


After the Goldrush

by Tealot



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Crisis of conscience, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by The Walking Dead, M/M, Other, Sexual Content, Sickness, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-04-20 05:55:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 56,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4776137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tealot/pseuds/Tealot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl Dixon is facing the ZA alone. His brother is gone and he has never met Rick Grimes and his crew. How will he survive and what will he become?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Since Daryl so often seems to be the only one with any sense I thought it would be interesting to explore what it might be like if he were on his own.
> 
> Title owned by the wonderful Neil Young.
> 
>  
> 
> Just an added note to anyone involved in this one. It has NOT been abandoned! I know I haven't touched it in a while. I got distracted. I had the wonderful experience of bumping into Norman right in my neighborhood when he was filming Ride and even though it was AWESOME it made writing Daryl a little weird. He kept turning into Norman. I think I got it worked out with some RPF and this one's in my head again so there should be new chapters soon.

He hadn't bothered to wait. Part of it might have been plain old piss off, but the better part of it, he was sure...because really it had to be, what kind of person would he be if it wasn't...was just that he couldn't stand the thought of such an affront to his brother. 

He wouldn't have wanted to become one of those...things. Not that he'd ever said, and thinking about it now he wondered if maybe he'd been a little quick on the trigger. Given Merle's personality and his twisted sense of humor he may very well HAVE wanted to turn.

Fucker would have probably thought it was cool.

Either way, he hadn't waited. 

They'd sat through the fever for the better part of a day, no soul searching or touching moments involved, not for those two. In all honestly they were poth pissed as hell at each other, Merle because Daryl had been right to caution against going anywhere there might be people, Daryl because Merle had not only not listened to him but had gone and gotten himself bitten, both of them because there they were with each other, no other faces optional, and not only had Merle not particularly wanted the last face he saw on this earth to be his brothers, Daryl wasn't particularly enamored of sitting by him waiting on that final breath. 

Want to or not, it had finally come, and he'd waited no more than the space between heartbeats before putting a knife in his brothers skull. When all was said and done, there was no reason, really, to wait. He knew he'd turn, they all did, and dead was dead. Might as well stay that way.

Truth be told...he didn't think he'd miss him, much.

There was some kind of love there, between them...evidenced by the infuriating way his eyes kept filling up....but it wasn't anything a casual observer would recognize as anything other than base loyalty, and realistically he had to admit...it wasn't much. They were blood. Plain and simple. 

Were. Past tense. Had been.

Now they were nothing and he was just him, and there wasn't a single part of him that was even willing to entertain the barest thought of the notion of finding other people. Civilization.

Fuck that, people were what spread this thing, and from what he'd seen of the uninfected....the living...there was precious little that was civil, anymore, about any of them.

Merle may have been hot to go to Atlanta...some seed of habit in his head arguing that where there was government there was control and where there was control there was order...never mind that he'd never given a fart in a tin shed for order before....but Daryls instincts had screamed the opposite. Still did.

Get the fuck away from the cities, from civilization, from people in general. Go somewhere people generally weren't. It stood to reason. No people meant no spread of whatever this was, meant no dead walking around, teeth bared and ready to bite, meant no homicidal assholes ready to fuck you up just because they could, no desperate simply exercising their survival instinct and blowing your head off, taking your stuff and running...something he and Merle had been doing now for weeks and it dug at him a little deeper every time they did it.

Of course there had been no arguing with Merle, there never was, and he had been, in his own mind at least, reasonable about it. If they gave up the goods...all their food, all their weapons, all their supplies....he might let them walk. He didn't touch the women, he avoided people with children...though Daryl had suspected it wasn't any inborn decency on his part so much as the knowledge that his brother would put a bolt in his eye if he dared any such thing.

Moot point, now, he was gone and sitting here in this ever increasing pinball thought storm wasn't going to do anything but see him gone as well, and while there was a highly audible voice in his head telling him that the smart thing to do would be to just take himself out now and spare the shitstorm ahead, the steel in him wouldn't hold with any such thing.

There was too much still to live for, not that he thought many would agree with him, but hell...the sun still came up every morning, went down every evening in a rush of cicada din that he absurdly loved. The river they'd been pacing for the last week or so had begun to run clear, trails and spangles of irridescence from pollution...gas, deisel, dye runnoff, chemicals....thinning daily. The air in the mornings had aquired a freshness he'd never encountered before, and there was some breath of coolness about it that hinted at a natural climate beyond the one he thought he knew.

Humanity might be gone...he suspected so at any rate...but he was still here and if he had his way he'd be here long enough to see just what happened to the world when you took the vermin of the human race out of the equation.

When the world cleaned house.

No...he wasn't ready to die. Not yet.

Nodding to himself, he stood up and brushed himself off, eyeing his brothers body as he did so.

Dead and staying that way.

He thought, briefly, about burying him, shrugged it off...no lack of respect for Merle, just an ever increasing awareness that needless exhaustion wouldn't do and that heat stroke now would likely kill him... shouldered his pack, his bow and his rifle and....glancing at and dismissing the road as a fools errand..headed into the woods.

From now on he was on his own, and he thought he might just like to keep it that way.


	2. ...and the archers split the trees.

His first thought, when the rain began, was "Oh...fuck." and purely out of habit, that, because there was no reason to really care if he got wet. 

 

It struck him funny..and aggravating..that his first thought even after all these weeks was that his cell would get wet. 

 

As it was, once he'd managed to jettison habit, the rain was a blessing, and he found himself shrugging out of his pack, now grown impractically bulky..heavy, and he knew he'd have to weed through it and decide what he really needed...stripped off his tshirt and gave himself over to the rain, letting it sluice through weeks worth of sweat, grit and road dirt, soothing and cooling his hot skin.  
He felt himself soaking it up like a sponge and realized how dehydrated he must have been. He'd felt sun baked and hadn't really even known it....scowling now at the realization that it would have done him well to have something to catch the water in. Sure the stores were still relatively full, but they wouldn't be forever, and the risks inherent in going anywhere formerly peopled....well...best avoided, though he'd had to admit, after tangling with more than a dozen walkers out here in no mans land, that Merle had been right in his assessment that it didn't matter where they went, those dead fuckers were still gonna be there. 

 

There were so MANY of them, was the thing. The mind fairly boggled. He'd caught himself mentally stalling when he'd finally gotten fed up and yelled at his brother; "How many of them can there really be?!"

Merle, unperturbed, had simply shrugged, given him that infuriating little smirk and tossed back "How many dead, brother?"

 

It'd been too much to think about, and put into practical terms it was unquantifiable. There were billions of the not quite mindless hungry dead, thousands of the desperate living, subdivided into the desperate decent and the desperate douchebags with a smaller but much more dangerous subcategory of the just plain evil.

 

He thought about it now, feeling suddenly terribly vulnerable standing here with his shirt off in the rain, bow set down next to him. Billions of people, the vast majority set to do him harm.  
One of him.

 

It was too much, and he was hurrying back into his clothes, shouldering the pack....damn it was heavy and he'd have to find someplace reasonably safe to hole up and sort through it soon...and the bow, glancing up at the sky.

Evening was on its way and he'd have to find someplace to sleep. 

 

Trial and error had taught him what NOT to do, and even the things that seemed perfect had turned out...for various reasons that all had to do with most of the population being dead...just exactly wrong.

 

Car trunks. That had been their first idea. Sleeping in the trunks of abandoned cars had seemed absolutely safe..until they realized that, there being no windows in trunks it was impossible to see what you might be emerging into and of course it had happened that one morning they'd awakened, opened their shelter and found themselves face to face with dozens of walkers.

 

First instinct had been to close the trunk and wait them out, leading to the realization that the dead did not grow impatient, did not grow tired and did not...ever...give up and go away.  
Once they had a bead on you they were on you like skin and it was fight your way out or die adjacent. 

 

Houses could be good, but there always seemed to be some of those dead fucks inside them that had to be cleared out, and then of course they had to be secured...no easy feat, really, when you thought about it. If someone wanted in they'd get in, and in houses it was the living to be feared far more than the stupid dead.

 

He found himself wishing for a train car....a box of solid steel, bolted from the inside. As close to impenetrable as he could think of, but then....just as much a trap as anything. 

 

The whole world was a trap now, though in all likelihood it always had been, and they'd all just been too distracted with their jobs and lives and toys and distractions to really notice it. A honey trap they were too stupid to notice and now it'd been slammed home to them.

 

The great weeding out had begun.

"Damned if I'm gonna get weeded."

He nodded to himself, completely unbothered by the fact that he was now talking to himself, and continued on, mind working and reworking what he had, what he needed, what he didn't, where to go...how to stay alive.

 

A few hours later, the idea "and to what end" had been added to the equation as his trudge continued unbroken into the night, no shelter having presented itself and the woods somehow, some way, and what the fuck was up with that anyway....alive with the creeping, crawling dead. 

 

He'd ended up in the middle of some random, wandering herd of them, pinballing their shambling way through the trees with those vacant staring eyes and gaping mouths. Stupid as they were, it hadn't been that hard to avoid them at first...he could hear them coming a mile away and it was easy enough to slip behind a tree or a bush or simply veer off...but they were coming in thicker now, and fast....too many to avoid reliably and killing one seemed to always set off the rest.

 

Like fucking bees, he thought, zigging to the side to avoid a clump of them, zagging again to avoid landing in anothers lap. Fuckers. He didn't want to start fighting them, though. There were too many and they really were like bees. Agitate one and they seemed to send out some signal that puts everybodys back up. A hive of the pseudo dead and what the fuck. He was getting too tired to stay alert, despite the adrenaline, and he'd caught himself micro dreaming more than once.

Good deal to get himself eaten.

 

He had to find a place to hide, but he'd gone with instinct and taken himself as far off the grid as he could manage in a day and good one, Dixon. He'd left himself high and dry....well...high and soggy footed and damned if that wasn't starting to hurt like a bitch. 

 

He started to laugh a little as his exhausted brain careened absurd thought off absurd thought.  
Note to self: Do not stand out in the rain again, asshole, unless you really want trenchfoot. And by the way, dumbass, how many ticks are stuck to you right now? Tick fever should be a fucking party, yeah?

 

Sighing, knowing he was done in, he'd found himself circling a bizarre mental drain comprised of one part determination to exist, one part futile ambiguity and a terrifying little splash of suicidal.

Why was he bothering?

"Shut the fuck up, Dixon. Asshole."

 

And there...he'd gone and done it. He couldn't see them in the dark, but he knew half a dozen dead heads had just turned toward the sound of his voice.

Fuck 'em. No way was he going to stand here and give up, his first night on his own, just because he was fucking tired. And lonely. 

There was a stupid truth. He was about to die because he was fucking LONELY??? 

"Oh, get serious."

 

And then he had it. Just like that and so simple he cursed himself a fool for not coming to it hours ago. It'd work, he knew it would. As long as they didn't see where he went. If they did, he was toast, because they'd wait him out, he knew.

 

Moving fast, now, his voice having cut his time to almost nothing, he flung his pack as far from him as he could, pinning the direction in his mind so he could retrieve it later....and thank god the one thing about the dead you DIDN'T have to worry about was them fucking with your stuff. They didn't give a shit about your stuff, it was your guts they were after....gratified at the heavy, meaty crash thump it made, mentally seeing all those heads swivel away from him and toward his pack, pinned the direction one more time, turned and ran...counting.

 

He gave himself to 10...far enough from the last place his voice had sounded, not so far he couldn't find his stuff again, slung his bow across his body and hauled himself into a tree.

 

He didn't think those fuckers ever looked up, and they sure as hell didn't climb. Up here, he could wait them out.

 

Hours later, he cursed himself a fool for ever climbing the fucking tree, because what kind of asshole idea had that been, anyway?  
He kept dozing off and almost falling out of the fucking tree.

 

He'd done what he could, finding himself a spot where several large branches converged, settled his ass against the tree trunk, wound himself in as tightly as he could, but he just couldn't stay awake....kept passing out, going limp, waking up as he started to slip, adrenaline flaring, heart pounding, stomach lurching....had taken to clawing at his own face to keep himself awake, pulling his hair, biting his hands, anything. Anything. 

 

Because they were still down there, the dead. Hundreds of them shambling by, a thick, noisome river of them and the stink was unbelievable. He'd gagged half a dozen times, swallowing back bile he wasn't about to spit out....zombie bait anyone? No way. Even that wasn't keeping him awake, though...his body was crashing and there seemed nothing he could do about it. 

 

Hindsight being 20/20, he kept thinking of the bungies in his pack....Merle had insisted they take them and until this moment he'd seen no reason for it, had almost thrown them away....though he could have for all the good hey were doing him now, way over there in the woods rather than up here strapping him to the fucking tree so he could go the fuck to sleep and not fall out.

 

He bit back a laugh, realizing that....if he made it through the passing of this herd....if he could manage to not puke on them...they'd love that and they'd be his loyal companions at the bottom of his tree forevermore....or fall asleep and tumble into the middle of them...he'd just solved his sleeping problem. 

 

Not the ticks, no. Nor the incipient trenchfoot.

 

Well. One thing at a time. As soon as this herd got it's stinking, shambling, groaning collective ass out of his way he'd go get his pack, get his bungies, haul ass up the tree again and tie himself in. 

So thinking, he dozed off again, startling awake as he tipped off the branch, grabbing out and once again miraculously finding a handhold, teeth sinking into his lip in an effort to make no sound, heart hammering so loudly it was a wonder they didn't all hear it and come running.

 

It was going to be a very, very long fucking night.


	3. From All the Truth Comes All the Shame

He found it oddly comical that he'd managed to work out how to sleep safely...climbing a tree and strapping himself in had worked like a charm...avoided herd after herd of walkers, dodged a multitude of assholes and even survived his own mental breakdown...only to be taken out by a bug.

It'd been weeks that he'd been on his own, he really had no idea how many, but the increasingly short days and cooler nights told him it had been several, and after the first rough couple he'd settled into a stability of soul that surprised even him. 

Running on instinct and an inherent intelligence he hadn't been fully aware of, he'd headed north, something telling him that the more isolated and cold the terrain, the better the likelihood he'd be undisturbed by the living OR the dead.

He'd had a few bad moments, early on. More than a few...especially after the morning he'd found the people at the quarry..drawn by the voices of women and children he'd peered out at them from the woods....people in an RV, children, a couple of girls fishing on the quarry from a small rowboat...and the urge to make himself known to them had all but overpowered him. He'd heard their conversations, some of their worries his own, and he'd recognized them as good people. Decent people. 

Weak, though. Vulnerable. Liabilities.

He'd watched them for a while, chewing his lip, wondering what they'd do if he came out of the woods and offered up his hands and his mind....would they listen? Would they shoot? Would they take him in? 

In the end it was just too uncertain, and the idea set up an odd anxiety in him. With people came attachment, and in this new world with attachment came loss. Guilt. Regret.

He'd moved on, unaware at the time that he'd set up a lethal ricochet in his own head, that he'd just honed his own misery.  
It preyed on him, after that, the solitude of his new existence, and he found himself glancing up at every snap and crackle in the woods with an absurd and frightening HOPE...heartbroken every time it turned out to be just another of the dead, and singly they weren't even all that alarming anymore, just tiresome. Easy to dispatch, he'd stopped even rushing, sometimes just skirting them and continuing on without sparing the effort. 

People he avoided...that sense of hope rising in him, dashed when he'd realize there were strangers around. Who, exactly, he kept hoping to see he had no clue....it never once occurred to him that it was Merle, who he had no idea he missed...and it frustrated him no end, eventually sending his thoughts into a careening, pinballing chaos that never seemed to shut up...and he'd find himself pulling at his hair with no idea he'd been doing it, or worse crying...stumbling along tearblind, head pounding, nose running with no control or understanding of just what the fuck his problem was. 

It was these times that turned his mind to suicide...no tiny exhausted glimmer this time but a bright, razor sharp beacon. 

After all, what was the point? He was walking...endlessly walking with no destination beyond some vague idea of "north" and there was no reason for it he could even contemplate. The world was gone. The few friends he'd had...and he'd had some, not Merles friends, no, and not the same type but he'd had them..were gone, anyone he'd ever considered loving, and even his brother. Gone. Just gone, all of them. Nobody left but survivors best avoided and the dead.

The dead he hadn't been able to save and why think that? Who had he thought he could...should...save? Everyone had pretty well been gone before he'd even known anything was happening, but even so the guilt ate at him. That it was his brother he was thinking of he dismissed out of hand. Merle had dug his own grave with his stubborn refusal to see reason, plain and clear.

It had peaked, this madness, one evening when he'd forsaken the tree climbing...his feet just hurt too much, weeks of being wet, and how long had it been since he'd actually taken his shoes off?...they'd begun to burn days ago and he knew the time had come to take care of it or lose some toes...in favor of a fortified little hunting cabin with shuttered windows, a good solid bolt on the door and plenty of food and water. 

He'd wanted nothing so much as to get his boots off. That was all. Get them off, get his feet dry, assess the damage, and make sure he didn't have anything dead or dying in there. Not a matter of comfort, it was down to survival. Something was wrong, they hurt too much and it was fix it or likely die.

He hadn't done it. The record player had done him in.

Cheap, plastic and portable, the type that had just begun to make a resurgence when the world went to hell, retro hailing back to the little battery operated numbers the girls in his neighborhood had liked to take camping with them back when he'd been a kid, playing their stupid little 45 rpm hits by the likes of Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett, and lord how he'd hated that shit.

He'd laughed when he'd seen it...it was so silly. In the age of digital music, which sounded quite bad enough in his opinion, why would anyone want a throwback to what was probably the worst thing ever created to torture music on?  
He'd ignored it, scavenged in the drawers and cabinets, helping himself to several pairs of dry socks, a first aid kit, and every bottle in the medicine cabinet. He'd sort through it all later, for now it was all potentially useful.  
He'd just sat down and reached for the ties on his boots when that stupid record player caught his eye again and he noticed the batteries.

He'd take those, too, and any flashlights he might come across....but what was actually ON the record player? And whatever it was, would it play?

The need to hear something, some other human voice, rose in him so suddenly it sickened him for a moment, leaving him doubled over and gasping, confused and confounded.  
What in the world was wrong with him?

He had to see what they'd been playing, had to hear it. It didn't matter what it was, good music, bad music, that it would sound horrendous on that stupid little memory of a machine, it was the sound of humanity and he suddenly, voraciously craved it.

He'd been touching it before he'd even realized he'd moved. Found himself just standing there with his hand on the switch, already assuming that the batteries in the stupid thing were dead and if they were he'd just shove the unopened packs in his bag and be done with this insanity.

So thinking, he thumbed it on, jumping a little as the turntable began to spin.  
So much for dead batteries.

On autopilot now, he shoved the unopened battery packs in his bag, eyes on the arm, the stylus, the needle. All he had to do was pick it up and set it to the edge of the spinning vinyl and there would be music.

It felt like a dream. A nightmare. Cold, freakish terror rilling up and down his spine for no reason he could comprehend and he saw his hand shaking as he reached, completely against his own will, for the needle, watching himself pick it up and set it to the shining black edge, hearing a crackle he hadn't heard since he'd been a child, leaping back as guitars screamed into existence.

At least it wasn't Shaun Cassidy, and after the first couple of seconds some of that dreamy fear had abated.  
It was just a record player, some cool retro toy he'd have never wasted his money on, but that was all it was. A new remnant of an old world twice removed. Junk.

He'd started to reach for the stylus, to pluck it off the vinyl and let the thing be, when the words floated out, hovered for a moment in search of a connection and knocked him senseless.

"No fear, no voice of reason. In God no guiding light. When all the guilt that's in your head...."

It was all he heard, all he was there to hear, the last few weeks suddenly crashing down on him with the weight of a million regrets, nothing in his head anymore but screaming, angry recriminations, screeching loneliness, endless guilt and a grief heavy enough he felt his skull cracking.

The world had grayed out, snippets of whatever that song was arrowing their way into his consciousness with demonic precision, bringing everything back.

"I take the throat of innocence and leave decay. I stain the way for all to see." and he was back in the garage, watching the little girl next door....who's crush on him had been legendary and, from his perspective at least, charming and sweet and he'd always been good to her.... shamble toward him, already blackened and streaming dead fluids, "...the darkest eyes from windows watch the screaming skies" and he was in that old house on the hill, watching as the helicopters napalmed his city and every hint of the only life he'd ever known. "unhallowed ground and tortured sky, walk in fear..." and he was done. Done. 

How much time passed he'd never know, but he'd come back into his mind to find himself sitting at a strangers table, a strangers revolver loaded and pressed to his temple, fingers cramped so tight on the gun he'd been unable to open them...flinging his hand away from his head but unable to let go of the gun, he'd had to use his other hand to pry his fingers apart, finally releasing it and shoving it away, tipping the chair in his rush to get out of the room, out of the cabin, out of his head.....

Halfway to nowhere and God only knew how far he'd run before he'd realized that he'd left everything in the cabin. Backpack, bow, guns, everything.

He'd wanted to leave it all. Fuck it, he could get new stuff, the world was full of stuff just lying around, he wasn't going back to that portal to hell, not on his life, not in a million years.

No way, no how, and fuck anything that thought it could make him.

So thinking, he'd turned, trudged back, somehow finding his way with unerring accuracy, no trace of hesitation in him when he hit the door, passed through, retrieved his things and with no second thought whatsoever grabbed the revolver and ammunition from the table, stowing the bullets in the pack, the gun in his belt.

That had been then, and here he was now. Up a tree, tied in place, laughing at himself for having survived the terror of the close-n-play but dying from a tic bite.


	4. Chapter 4

The irony wasn't lost on him, and as he gazed down into the groaning, gawping mass below him he almost had to laugh. This was where stupid got you, and there was no other excuse for having landed himself in this mess.

He'd finally peeled his wet socks off, taken one look at his feet....the pads thickly white and swollen, peeling to red patches that burned like acid, blistered everywhere else....and almost given up again. 

That there were seven or eight enormous, blood glutted ticks inside his socks...clustered around his ankles like vampiric little chains...did nothing to improve his mood, and he'd morosely tweezed them off, noting to himself that he couldn't put it off any longer.

He'd have to go into a town, find a pharmacy, and stock up on antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, antieverything as far as he was concerned. 

He'd been lucky so far, none of his bites had infected him, but statistically he knew his luck would be running out and the time had come. 

Laughing a little, he'd reflected back on some of the conversations he'd skulked around to overhear...people in his woods carrying on about having to find places to go scavenge food and water. The woods were full of food and the water ran cleaner every day. Those people needed to go nowhere, but far be it from him to discourage them. If they wanted to brave the dregs of civilization it was fine by him, at least it would get them out of his woods.  
Now it was his turn, the need for preventive drugs paramount in his mind. He couldn't afford to get sick out here.

Figured that as soon as he'd decided to do it, one of those little fuckers had infected him.

He'd known what it was as soon as it started, and it had come on fast.

He'd been following the power lines out when the first aches had settled in to his neck, shoulders, hips, groin. Not the clean ache of exertion..something he barely noticed anymore...but a dirty, sick complaint in the joints that he recognized instantly.

"Fuckin' great. Just great."

Well, there was nothing he could do about it but keep going and get some drugs in him as quickly as he could.  
Anger at himself spurred him on. He'd been unbelievably stupid to put this off, he'd known he needed to do it, and having waited so long who knew what would be left for him to find? Not for the first time he cursed himself a fool for not bothering to learn which plants in the woods were medicinal. He knew which ones were edible and that was fine but it wasn't going to do much for the queasy thumping in his head, now was it? Or the pain in his gut.  
His feet he didn't even want to think about, not that he could help it. Walking had become a sheer misery as layers of skin peeled off with every step. He'd have to find somewhere to go where he could let them dry out and fuck if he didn't know it could take weeks to fully heal. 

"Not like you don't have time, Dixon, where you got to be? Somewhere?"

There was that. 

"Should build a treehouse."

Ha, there was an idea. Build a treehouse with all of the ready access to power tools laying around...just head off to the nearest home depot and pick up some lumber.  
"While you're at it, asshole, get yourself a nice rug and a couple throw pillows, maybe a candle."  
Snorting in derision at his own foolishness, and here he was talking to himself again, a habit he'd developed that he hated, his own voice scaring the living hell out of him every time he heard it and wasn't that fucking wonderful.

Not as wonderful as the revolution about to be staged in his innards, and he knew he'd have to find some kind of shelter before the inevitable shitting and puking started if he didn't want to draw every walker within a hundred miles right to him.

"Might as well hang a sign. Free buffet."

Sighing, feeling every bit the fool he knew he was, he felt his gameplan shift of its own accord.  
He wasn't gonna make it into a town, not feeling like this, not as fast as it seemed to be coming on. Misery he could deal with and he'd walk forever feeling like hell but only as long as everything inside stayed there. Those dead fucks could smell and it wouldn't be long now before he'd be leaving a trail of zombie bait. 

Well. Tick fever wouldn't kill him, he had plenty of water stowed in his bag and at least he could take off his boots and let his feet dry while he rode it out.  
If he could find a place to ride it out, anyway. Up a tree wouldn't do, not this time. He'd puke and bring a gathering right to the bottom. He'd look down and find them playing cribbage down there till he either came down or starved to death. 

"Way to go, Dixon. Way to go. You got yourself in it this time you moron."

Stubborn, he'd kept on, eyes peeled for anything resembling shelter, but as the shadows lengthened he'd started to stagger, almost too dizzy to stay on his feet, to stumble, the buzz in his head now louder than any of the outside sounds, shambling through the woods much like a walker as he lurched along in no particular direction, shivering and sweating and groaning as wave after wave of nausea brought bile into his throat...resolutely swallowed back though it didn't much matter if he spat it out or not, now, since he'd already had to stop half a dozen times, everything in him that wasn't nailed down on it's way out with express train speed through one end or the other. He could only thank god he hadn't eaten much...

He'd finally given up, known it was up a tree or pass out on the ground, and hauled himself up....falling back to the ground too many times to count before he'd finally managed to get himself up there, dropping a bungee in the tying off process and fucked if he was going to go down after it. 

"Turning into one skinny fuck, there, Dixon."

He was, and he hadn't really noticed before, but the fact that he could strap himself into a tree with two bungees instead of three pretty well brought it home to him.

Whatever. He was in and he wasn't going down till this had passed, and what the fuck ever did he care how messed up he got. He'd sit up here and sweat and puke and shit and draw zombies with wild abandon, he was far too miserable to care. So be it.  
With the last clarity of thought he'd have for quite a while, he unbuckled his pack, shrugged it off and buckled it to a branch. His water was in there and he'd need that. The bow he slung around his neck where it couldn't fall, double checked his straps and leaned forward, groaning a little at the pain in his gut, pulling off his boots and socks and dropping them to the ground.

Good. 

At least his feet could dry out. And when this passed, and it would, he'd figure out what to do about whatever clusterfuck was going on at the ground beneath his tree.

And well, maybe not, because, hours later, look at that mess down there. Down him, down the tree, down to the ground and there they were, those dead sons of bitches. Not a one of them had looked up as far as he could tell, they weren't smart enough for that, but they were milling around down there, sniffing....groaning...gawping. He'd puked on their heads a few times and still none of them had looked up even though they'd clearly heard him...though he thought if they had it wasn't likely they'd see him. He'd always been careful to go higher than the first levels of leaves, not a foolproof shield but good enough for these dim bulbs and so far it seemed to be working. They were just hanging around sniffing at the puke like dogs. 

Let 'em.

Half the time, now, he forgot they were there, and when clear thinking reasserted itself he was too miserable to care. 

Fuck but he was sick, sicker than he could ever remember tick fever making him. The headache alone was enough, it felt like his skull was cracking. That and the fever...setting him sweating and shivering by turns and he knew he'd been in and out...his own voice bringing him back too many times to count and of course those assholes at the bottom of his tree had to have heard him, had to know he was up here. 

Stupid, was what it was. Having lasted all this time only to be ended by a critter the size of a match head and his own stupid procrastination. He'd known better. Known he needed to stock up on meds. Known he needed to tie off his pant legs.  
The fever was taking him back, now, and his thoughts careened off into delirium as he thought about it, about all he'd known. Known known known and now HE was known, because they were down there now arguing about who was gonna go up and get him and he guessed he must have been wrong and those fuckers COULD climb, could think, could speak!

Impressed, he slipped further under. Who had known? Maybe he was the only one who did know. They sure could think, sure could speak, because listen to them down there.

"You better go up and get him."

"I'M not gonna go get him, he's covered in..."

"Does it matter what he's covered in? He's pulling those things like moths to a flame and if you don't want them permanently in our backyard you better go up there and get him!"

"Fuck, just leave him up there."

"No, are you crazy? He'll die and we'll have a biter in a tree calling his friends to come hang out with him. Fine, hold my shit, I'll go get him."

"You're not big enough."

"Then you do it."

Up his tree, Daryl laughed to himself at the knowledge, his and his alone, that the walkers could speak, think, argue, amused even as the fever soared higher and took him away.


	5. Chapter 5

He thought it was a grave, at first, and really what other way could he have thought of it? 

Closed in and tight, damp and stinking of sour dirt, the weight of what had to be the world sitting square on his chest, squeezing the breath from him.

It wasn't until he felt the air...wet, cold and reeking...not a caress to his face but a slap, that he realized he wasn't buried and thought to crack an eye open.

His gaze fell on bars, thick and rusted, short, no more than a couple of feet in length and set into the earth he lay upon on the bottom, into the concrete ceiling mere inches above his face.

It was through these bars that the dank air flowed, carrying on its damp breath the smell of corruption...a charnel stink that could only belong to the dead.

Maybe he really was in a grave.

If the way he felt meant anything, he could readily understand why he would be. Whoever had found him...and he knew, of course, that the voices he'd heard hadn't been the dead arguing but the living judging his fate...must have thought him dead, left him here in this tomb.  
WAS he dead? Was he one of those..things? Did they muse? Think? Was this amalgam of hot/cold/breatheless/nauseated misery their existence?  
For one heart stopping instant he considered it, then dismissed it out of hand. The dead were hungry and he felt as if he'd never want to eat again.

Ever.

Just thinking about it sent waves of black nausea rolling through him, and as he turned his head, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, away from the bars...an unenclosed window to the outside he could now see, through which frigid, damp air inundated his earth bed...a congealing mass of unidentifiable, sour smelling muck not an inch from his face told him that he'd been vomiting in his sleep and was damned lucky to be alive. 

Alive.

But where?   
Less than six inches of space on either side, nor above him, that barred window separating him from the outdoors, a similarly barred door on his other side giving way into a darkness he knew was an interior only by the mucky, muddy, musty scent wafting in. 

A cell. Barely long enough for a man to lie in, and now that he was more alert he could feel that he wasn't stretched out, not by a long shot, his legs bent sideways, neck curved toward his shoulder, propped partly onto his side by something that felt like a rock...no space whatsoever to move.  
Still, he was a little stiff but not in the pain he'd have expected. The parts of him he was lying on weren't overly cold, weren't numb...someone had been making sure he didn't stay in one position for too long.  
It hadn't been him, he couldn't have moved to save his life, something he realized with a stabbing jolt of terror breathtaking in its intensity.  
He couldn't move. He didn't have the strength. Didn't have the breath, his chest weighed down by some invisible cement building. 

What the fuck?

Sick as hell, no doubt about it, something more than the tick fever he'd fallen asleep with, something in his lungs, and was it any wonder? He was freezing in this wet little cell, despite the blanket someone had thrown over him. Freezing. Probably had pneumonia, left here to shiver in this damp...but damned if that cool breeze didn't feel good on his face, didn't sooth the heat there because fuck he was hot. 

"Oh you're so fucked, Dixon. So fucked."

His voice came out a throat cracking croak, setting off a run of coughing that felt like it was tearing his chest apart, filling his throat with crap he couldn't turn enough to not choke on, gagging him even as he struggled to at least turn his head the rest of the way to the side...the whole mess almost ended in an instant of heart stopping terror as hands suddenly seized him....inhuman, leathery and huge, monstrous deformed hands reaching through the bars and what the fuck had him?!...pulled him roughly onto his side, one enormous paw letting go long enough to unlock the interior door and swing it open, the hands now arms, pulling him harder, dragging him partway out and suddenly he was sitting up, leaning against something warm, could breathe again, a little anyway, could clear the shit from his throat.

"Spit that out, don't swallow it."

Yeah, he wasn't about to. He was too close to puking to even consider it, and he sure as hell wasn't about to look at it, whatever it was, either, though the voice of reason in his head was screaming at him now to open his eyes, see what the fuck he'd just ripped out of his own chest, what the fuck had a hold of him, where the fuck he was.

He heard it. He acknowledged it, somewhere deep, but there wasn't enough of him left to bother with it, to do anything but sit here, leaning against whoever held him, and try to catch his breath.

That voice had been female.

Some girl with huge black hands made of iron, strong enough to haul him out of a stone cell and sit him up.  
Did he really want to see her?

"You're awake. I really wasn't sure you'd come around again."

The voice was conversational, matter of fact, with no hint of regret or relief, and he felt himself shifted, felt the yeilding warmth behind his back give way to hard stone as she moved him to the wall.

"Can you open your eyes? I'm pretty sure you're alive but I'd like to confirm if it's all the same to you. And try to stay sitting up, you're breathing a lot better upright. I really didn't want to put you in the cell but we really weren't thinking you'd make it and we didn't want to be eaten in our sleep."

They thought he'd turn?

He pulled his eyes open again, wincing against the light...light he hadn't noticed before, how far gone was he? hissing a little in pain at the grit around his eyes.

"I'm not..."  
His voice broke and he fought to clear it, to keep his eyes open....drifting even as he spoke, hauling himself back by sheer force of will. 

"Not bit."

"I know you're not. If you were you'd be ash. Can you see?"

"Not really."

He heard a little hum, something affirmative maybe, and flinched away as something wet touched his eyes.

"Hold still, it's just water."

He felt it sluice over his eyes, run down his face, making him shiver...but the painful grit washed away with it and as he raised a hand to wipe the water away he found himself able, finally, to focus, taking in his surroundings and the girl crouched in front of him, eyes immediately going to her hands...not the monstrous things he'd perceived before but clad in falconers gloves.   
She saw his gaze and nodded. 

"I didn't want to reach in in case you'd...."

"Already told you, I aint bit."

"I know that. That wouldn't have stopped you from biting me, though, now would it."

She peeled off a glove, pressed the hand to his forehead.  
"Still pretty hot. Really not sure if you're outta the woods yet. I hate to say it but you might have to stay down here a while longer. It's not ideal...it's so damp. And there's no room to move, but the fresh air is good for you, you're safe, and if you turn you can't get at us."

He wanted to argue, wanted to tell her there was no way he was getting back into that little coffin of a dirt cell...couldn't do it. He didn't have it in him.

All he seemed to have left was to sit here and breathe and try not to puke. And shiver. Holy fuck was he cold. Again.

"Here..."

He jumped as something touched his lips, realized his eyes had fallen closed again.

"Easy, it's just water."

Ah, God, he was so thirsty. So thirsty..but just the thought made his stomach turn.  
"No..."  
He pushed it away, heard her frustrated curse as it clattered to the ground, her heavy sigh as she touched his face again.

"You need to drink."  
"No."

And fuck it, he was falling asleep again anyway. With any luck maybe this time he wouldn't wake up.

He didn't get his wish, though it didn't take him long to realize just how close it had been.

He woke again, coughing. Coughing and sweating, real dripping, running, squelch when he moved sweating and he realized he was soaked.   
Great.  
Soaked and locked in a cell, lying in mud comprised mostly of his own bodily fluids, ragingly thirsty and every bit as nauseated as he'd been before, muscles aching...and this time he recognized the added burn of immobility.  
There'd been nobody making sure he moved, not for a while.   
And the blanket, tangled around his feet and kicked to the bottom of the cell, was as soaked as the rest of him. He was hazy on his last awakening but he thought it'd been dry then, and she'd given him another one, that girl. 

"Oh fuck."

He stretched a little, experimentally, felt long stiff muscles screech in protest. Not the ache of sickness, this, no indeed. His feet were dead numb, the circulation well and truly cut off and for god knew how long...there wasn't enough room in here to even attempt to stretch his legs or sit up but he managed to shift them enough to feel the numbness eventually begin to give way to pain, to uncurl his arms...they felt locked in place and for a few hair raising moments he'd been afraid they simply wouldn't move again.

Locked in...and alone and whoever his caretakers had been it didn't seem they'd been around for a while.  
Did they think he was dead?  
Were they?

"Fuck, fuck fuck...."

He had to get out of the cell.   
A shove on the door didn't yeild any motion and for a minute he panicked, the breath freezing in his lungs. Locked in. Truly locked in and if they were dead, or thought he was...well he would be, and very soon. 

"Get a fuckin grip, Dixon. She opened the door before."

Yes she had. Had there been a key?

He didn't think so.  
A latch. A handle. 

Nodding, he shifted himself as close to the bars as he could and stuck an arm through.   
No good. Couldn't reach anything.

"Fuck."

Shifted again, curling in on himself, finding another angle.  
Nothing. He was turned the wrong way, and while he thought he knew where the handle must be, he was in exactly the wrong position to reach it.   
Exhausted and panting from even these minimal efforts he had to stop and catch his breath...catching an odor along with it, one infintitely worse than the obnoxious smell of his own body rising from the mud around him.   
Death. Decay.   
He'd caught it before, when he'd first awakened, wafting in through the exterior bars, but it had been faint then...distant. This was a thick reek he could taste..and now that he was still he could hear them out there. The dead. Groaning and shuffling and stinking...it sounded like hundreds of them and they could smell and he stank and this cell had bars that gave out onto the outside.  
He bit back the little whimper that tried to escape him, pushed himself as close to the interior bars as he could. There were only a couple of inches of space between the window bars, it wasn't likely they could reach in, but if they could and they scratched him....had they already scratched him? Was that why his captors had left him alone? Or were they planning to do away with him anyway?   
Panic set in with a vengeance and he found himself scrabbling madly through the door, desperate to find the handle, find anything....

"Ssshh!"

It was a hiss, just the sibilant, no words to accompany it and it froze him completely.

"Don't make a sound, don't move."

This one right in his ear, and he felt the arm he'd extended through the bars pushed back in, felt a hand press against him, wordlessly telling him to hold still.  
Well, he'd be happy to but the coughing was coming on again, harsh and wracking and completely uncontrollable.  
Outside, he heard the shift as the dead arrowed in on the sound, felt the air choke off to a stink of decay that made him gag even as he fought to quiet the cough...and inside he heard the whispered curse from the man outside his cell, felt the hand against his chest push harder and he resisted, not wanting to get any closer to that window.

"Quit fighting me and back off the door a little, I'm trying to open it!"

Still a whisper but a hell of a lot louder, and he complied, relief flooding him as the door suddenly gave way and he felt arms grabbing him, pulling him out.

"Move!"

He slid away, heard the latch click down and new the cell door was locked again.

"Come on. Get up..."  
He couldn't, though, couldn't stop coughing, couldn't move, couldn't stop the surge of bile in his throat, and he heard the man next to him swear softly.  
"All right."  
Hands had him, again, suddenly. Not gentle, not friendly..not these hands. Hard, rough, angry and panicked they hauled him up and shoved and he let them...god knew it was too dark to see..or his eyes were stuck shut again he couldn't really tell...felt his head impact the side of the doorway with a brilliant flash of light, heard another muttered curse and felt hands sweeping him...knew immediately that they were looking for his, checking that he was clear and he reached out and caught hold of the man with him...heard the grunt of acceptance as a door....huge and metal by the sound...slammed shut with a clang and a lock spun.  
"You're hands weren't caught in that, were they?"

"No..."

Fuck, he couldn't breathe.

"Ok, take it easy, you're gonna pass out. We're ok for now. I don't think even that number of them can get in though I guess if they push against anything long enough it'll give way...come on, get it together. I'm gonna turn on a light."

Get it together. Good one. He couldn't stop fucking coughing long enough to get a real breath and there was something hot running down his face...blood probably, from the bash in the head...get it together.

He heard himself laughing as black light bloomed behind his eyes and the world disappeared again.


	6. Chapter 6

"Come on, man, come on!"  
Shit, if they'd just stop yelling in his ear. It was loud enough with the incessant roar in his head. 

"Come on, wake UP!"  
Good, and now they were shaking him. It wasn't enough his brains felt like they were falling out, now they were being battered against the inside of his skull. And fuck he was dizzy...between the pain and the spins he was almost sure his entire brain, eyes and all, were rotating inside his skull. He could almost feel his eyeballs scraping against the back of his head as they went by and he sure as fuck couldn't see anything but red, bloody looking darkness.

"Man, PLEASE wake up, I can't carry you and carry the light and I can't see without it."  
Shaking him, shaking him...  
"Quit it. Quit shaking me."  
He tried to yell, felt it come out a whispered croak but at least it was out, and the shaking stopped immediately, the hands now just holding him and thank god for that because he sure as fuck wouldn't be standing on his own.  
"Should have just left me in the hole."

"No, man, no. They might have reached through. Can you open your eyes? Can you walk? We shouldn't stay down here. I don't think they can get in but...."

"I know. I heard you. Anything can come down. Gimme a second."

In truth he needed more than a second and he knew it, but the urgency in the guys voice told him it was no joke. They needed to move. 

"Just don't let go."  
It galled him to say it, but fact was fact. If the guy let go he'd be on the floor.

"I won't. Can you open your eyes?"  
"They're not?"  
"No."  
"Fuck."  
He tried, found them sticky but serviceable, raised a hand to knuckle them open and hissed in pain.

"What the fuck, they hurt like a bitch."  
And they weren't working all that well either. The world was there, but it was smeary, covered with a film that looked like vaseline.

"Can you see?"

"Kind of. Enough to not walk into anything. Let's go if we're goin, I'm not gonna be standing much longer."

Wasn't that the truth. If he got out that next set of doors he thought it might be a miracle.

"Just lean on me and we'll get where we're going. It's not far, this place isn't big."

Big enough, he made it through the doors and up a short flight of stairs before he felt the start of that hollow implosion in his head, saw those black, bright flowers blooming behind his eyes, felt that now familiar tightening in his chest...fought to stifle the coughing he knew was about to start.

"Hold up, hold up."

"We..."

Didn't matter. He couldn't breathe...felt the cough start even as his consciousness dimmed....though small favors in abundence it didn't go out completely, and he didn't land on his ass, though he thought that, if the guy hadn't helped him sit he probably would have. And fuck if this cough wasn't tearing his chest apart. 

It didnt' last long...and he didn't puke thank god, though he'd thought for a few minutes he was going to...giving way to an out of breath panting he liked even less. Christ he was weak. 

"You alright?"

"Aint had my chest hurt this bad since my brother kicked my ribs in, but....yeah. I think so."

"Think you can walk?"

"I got a choice?"

"You can lay here in the hall and freeze."

Damned if it wasn't cold, just as cold as that cell had been, and he had no desire to spend any more time shivering.

"You got someplace warm?"

"Yeah, we have a fireplace. And blankets. Dry clothes. Trust me..."

He stood up, extended a hand, helped him up.

"You'll be a lot better off if you can manage it."

"Well alright then, I guess I'll manage it."

"It's just a few more feet, you'll make it."

"You say that like it's a sure thing."

"I won't leave you here, so it is."

He slipped an arm around him, in truth more than half carrying him and if that wasn't discomfitting nothing was, but it did what it had to do and in little more than a minute they were through another set of doors...steel, he noted....all these door sets were steel....and into warmth.  
"Come on, Jill set up a bed for you."

"That's the girl with the blankets?"

"That's the only girl, so I guess so. You want to get out of those clothes before you lie down or you'll just stay wet. If you can't manage I'll help you."

"I can manage."

He wasn't entirely sure he could, but he was damned if he was letting some stranger strip him down.

"Where's the girl?"

"Wish I knew. She's not here so you don't have to worry about her walking in if that's what you were worried about."

"Whattaya mean not here? Not...."

He stopped, out of breath and coughing again, wanting to shrug off the hand that took hold of his shoulder, unable to reasonably let himself. 

"I mean she's not here. We left...I don't know how long ago we left. By the look of you it's been a few days at least. There was some crazy ass shit going on outside, we both went out to see what it was and got hung up. I just got back. She's not back yet."

The cough was tapering off, now, and he shoved out of the rest of his clothes...not just wet but fairly reeking and christ he wished he could wash some of the sludge off.

"Hung up how?"

"You want to wash off a little?"

"Yeah..."

He watched the guy...not much more than a kid, really...if he was legal yet it'd be a shock...cross to the fireplace...and christ it was huge, it took up almost the entire wall...and reach barehanded into a pot steaming on a grate, heard him hiss a little at the burn as he pulled out a wet towel, holding it gingerly by a corner as he waited for it to cool enough to ring out.  
"You need some tongs or something for that."

"I know. We need a lot of things but since the world ended we just take what we can get. Here, careful."

He accepted the hot towel, mindless of it's cleanliness or whoever else might have used it, or for what, pressing his face into it gratefully, rubbing at his eyes and sighing a little in relief as the heat seemed to sooth the burn.   
He managed to get the sweat and crusted on whatever it was off his face and neck before his strength gave out and he just gave up, leaned forward with his head on his arms, ready to sleep there, sitting curled on a stone step, naked with a stranger and to hell with it.

"Here, give me that."  
He felt the towel, now just warm, gently removed from his grasp, felt it rubbed gently against his back, shoulders, arms.

"Can you sit up?"  
"I don't really think so. I'm clean enough."  
No way was this dude washing off his junk. It could stay just like it was. 

"You're really not, but ok. If I help you, can you make it just across the room? There's a bed for you."  
"Ok."

It wasn't much of an answer but it was the best he could do. He wrapped the now cold towel around his middle with fingers that felt wooden, and yeah, things were fading out again. He limped across, once again more than half carried but no longer bothered by it, proof he supposed of how sick he still was, and felt the spins restart, the nausea returning.

"Hey..."

"I know, I can see it. Here, give me that, you don't want to get the bed wet."

He felt himself more or less dropped onto a pile of softness...blankets stacked up or a mattress he didn't know, didn't care...more softness drifting over him, sudden guilt rising in him for the mess he was suddenly sure he was about to make of this bed.  
His worry was needless, as he'd no sooner curled onto his side...the better not to choke to death when he threw up and that was coming, sure as breathing...that he felt something cool touch his hand, opened his eyes onto a bowl.  
"Use this if you get sick. You look like you might. There's water here..but I'm gonna go get you something to drink with some sugar in it. Don't get up. You're safe enough in here, I don't think anything..or anyone...can get in. If I don't get back soon, those barrells over there are also full of water and there are emergency rations in that room over there. There's a latrine through that door and lockers full of clean clothes through that other door."

"Where you goin to get me a drink that you'll be gone that long?"

"I'm gonna walk the perimeter too. I should be right back, I'm not going outside, but I've learned not to count on anything. Here."

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a medicine bottle.  
"It's the cotton candy kid stuff but it's amoxicillin. Take a slug as soon as you think you might be able to keep it down. If I don't come back, follow the directions on the bottle but like...triple them. They're for a little kid. There's more in there with the food. Also painkillers."  
"You sure you're not going outside?"  
"I'm positive. The whole yard is crawling with those things and there were real people out there as well. I'm more worried about them, if you want the truth."

"You should be. And you should put out that fire. They'll see the smoke."

"They already have, but they can't figure out where it's coming from. I'll explain all that later. Just take it easy, I'll be back."

He started across the room, stopping abruptly in the doorway and turning back.

"Hey, what's youre name?"

"What's yours?"

"Devin."

"Daryl."

"Ok, Daryl. If something small and creepy looking and making crazy dead thing noises comes slithering in here on the floor, please don't freak out and stomp it. It's very much alive."

"What is it, your dog?"

"My daughter."

"Your..."

"I'll explain that, later, too. Try to rest. I should be right back."

As if he could rest on that parting note.  
Not much chance, every nerve in his body seemed to be alight.  
Though the dizziness and nausea had retreated as soon as he'd stopped moving, the pressure in his chest was fairly immense and the idea of suddenly being alone in a place he was utterly unfamiliar with, combined with the thought of something creepy and slithery and making dead noises being in here with him...well he didn't suppose sleep was going to happen any time soon.  
Where would this thing come from, he wondered?  
The room he was in seemed completely its own. Huge and almost round, the one uncurved wall being the one comprised of the enormous fireplace, the walls, ceiling and floor all appeared to be stone. The small doors he'd been told housed food stores, lockers and a latrine were doorless, gaping black maws but he was fairly sure they housed no other points of egress or outlet.   
"Closets, most likely"  
His own voice startled him and he jumped, gasped, bit his lip to hold the cough in, continued his assessment of the room.  
Warm, with the fire, but not smoky...the chimney vented well which meant there was plenty of smoke visible to the outside and that was a danger regardless of what the kid...Devin....had said.  
No windows, steel door.....probably as close to impenetrable as people were able to make, but he knew from experience that nothing was, not really. If there were people outside, they'd get in.  
Not the dead, probably. The dead were stupid, the biggest danger one of numbers. If a large enough herd pressed en masse they could, as the kid had said, probably take anything down but the living....they could reason. They could problem solve. If they wanted in they'd get in.  
Still, he thought he knew where he was now, what this place might be. Maybe. Maybe not. If he was right, the walls should be covered with graffitti but they weren't...they were water and age stained, discolored, and there was a funky, musty scent in the air..but they were clean. The whole place was clean.   
Creepy. It was creepy.  
And goddamn if he wasn't starting to shiver again, the buzz of fever starting back up in the top of his head.  
Great. The kid would come back and just drag him back down to that hole.  
He couldn't worry about it..couldn't much worry about anything...fever drift taking him solidly in its grasp, now, and he was asleep again almost before he could process the thought.

He almost surfaced countless times... the feeling that he was suddenly submerged in warmth and wetness bringing him close...the feel of that same warmth running down his face, into his eyes..the sting of it, the burn almost rousing him completely...fever winning out and pushing him back on the touch of soft hands and sound of a girls voice, dimly aware some untold time later of a hand on the back of his neck, something warm and salty held to his lips. Vague and dreamy, even the harsh and painful almost awakening as the cough tore his chest apart, hands held him up, held something to his mouth to catch whatever horror he was coughing up, he couldn't quite come all the way into the world and so be it, because while there was no alertness there was also no fear.   
Time ceased, his existance nothing but oblivion interspersed with soft dream images of the flickering fire, soft hands, the faintly unpleasant sensation of his mouth constantly being full of something, tonal variations murmuring either to swallow or shouting to spit it out, of somehow pacing the floor, arms around him, words both encouraging and haranguing....all dim behind the haze, muted behind the buzz...warmth and voices and nothing.

When he woke again, finally, it was with the feeling that days had passed....and with them the sickness. Nothing hurt. Nothing. Even his feet didn't hurt and christ how long had he been here that his feet were healed?   
He stretched a little and felt no ache, just the harmony of muscle against bone against skin, against whatever soft comfort he found himself cradled in. He hadn't been this comfortable since the world ended.  
It was a disconcerting awakening, even so, perhaps moreso, as his alertness returned to normal and he realized just how out of it he had to have been, how helpless in the hands of these strangers.  
He was clean, which simultaneously felt wonderful and freaked him full out as the dim and hazy recall of a bath came back to him.   
He ran his hands over his chest, his hips....found himself clothed in something soft and worn but also clean, peeled the covers back to look and groaned a little to find himself in pajama bottoms and a t shirt. They really had dumped him in a tub and redressed him and where in fuck had he been while all this was going on?

Levering himself up on an elbow, riding the ensuing headrush for a second before pushing himself the rest of the way to sitting, he angled a foot up, looked at the sole.  
Not completely healed but close. Very close. He'd been here a while.  
He thought he could remember voices, though looking around now..through still smeary vision and what was up with that...he could see he was alone. The fire was burning and it wasn't low..they'd been here recently...and a glance next to him showed the floor next to his head cluttered with cups of liquid, empty medicine bottles, towels, basins.   
He reached to touch the water in one, found it still warm. They'd just been here.  
Sighing, he fell back, wanting to get up...gradually realizing that he had to piss like a goddamn racehorse...knowing he'd fall on his ass if he tried it. Just sitting up for a minute had him winded, and while he no longer felt sick, he felt christly fucking weak.  
He'd need a minute before he tried anything crazy like getting up.  
Sighing again, he turned back to the litter of sickroom supplies next to him, reaching out to pick up the medicine bottles. All empty and all different...that sugary bubblegum liquid they gave kids with sore throats mostly. Ampicillin. Amoxicillin. Erythromycin. Augmentin.   
They'd gone through a shitload of antibiotics on him, all of it kid dosed he supposed he'd gone through at least a bottle of the shit a day, and why in the world would they have used up all this medicine on him? Why haul in a sick stranger and use up their supplies?  
Stupid.  
It wasn't that he wasn't grateful...he was. But it had been stupid. Did they think they could just go to the drugstore and get more?

Although maybe they weren't that stupid. If they had this much of the kid stuff they probably had an equal stash of the adult stuff but they hadn't used it on him. They'd used the weaker stuff, the stuff they'd be less likely to need. The stuff less likely to work.  
Still...  
Better to have kept it.   
Hadn't that guy..what had his name been? Couldn't think of it, wouldn't come....but hadn't he said he had a kid?  
He thought he might have. Though he might have dreamed it. Might have dreamed the hole, too, now that he thought about it. This was miles away from...but no. No, because he remembered the trek from there to here and it had been no dream. Those dead scrabbling at the bars had been no dream.  
Or maybe the whole thing was and he was still up in that tree, dying of the goddamn flu or whatever it was he'd had.

"Goddamn strange afterlife, then."

He'd known, this time, he was going to speak and thankfully didn't scare the life out of himself as he'd been doing for weeks, but his voice was weak, hoarse...still sick sounding and he didn't much care for it. 

Fuck.

And what was up with his eyes?

He reached up, rubbed at one, horrified as he pulled his finger back coated with some sticky slime.

"What the...."

"It's ointment."

The voice came out of nowhere, and if his own hadn't scared him, this one jumped him out of his skin and the way he had to piss he considered it a miracle he hadn't wet the goddamn bed.

"Fuckin Jesus Christ! Let someone know you're there, what the fuck!"

"Sorry."

She didn't sound particularly sorry.

"That's opthalmic ointment in your eyes. You had a good infection going in both of 'em but I think it's mostly cleared now. Along with everything else. You're lucky. I'm pretty sure you had pneumonia."

"How's that lucky?"

 

"You're not out there with a bullet between your eyes. Or rotting tied up a tree trying to eat everything that moves."

 

His eyebrows went up a little at that, but he kept silent, just watching her.   
"We didn't know if this stuff would work..."

 

She took the empty bottles from him, gesturing with them as she spoke.

"But Def was solid we weren't using up the z paks."

So they did have a stash of the good shit. 

He nodded, pushing himself upright again.

"Good, that's smart. You shouldn't have used this stuff, either."

"You'd be dead."

"Yeah, well..what if you need it?"

She shook her head, eyeing him critically.

"You know what we really need? Resourceful people. Smart people. With survival skills. You tying yourself to that tree to sleep was so goddamn smart...if you hadn't been puking down it it would have been perfect."

"Couldn't help that."

 

"I know. When we went to get you we already knew we were either going to take you in or take you out, depending. You weren't too inclined to cooperate but you didn't try to hurt either of us, either. You defended yourself but you didn't attack."

 

She fell silent, thinking, and he let her be. 

"You told us you weren't bit. Told us you weren't contagious, that it was from a tick. You didn't shoot us out of hand. So...we thought you might be like minded, that we could use you."

Use him, huh? He felt his eyebrows go up again, thought soon they might be somewhere in the air above his head, but he kept quiet.

"Probably, now that I think about it, not a reasonable assumption. Call it the last dregs of humanity being purged."

She reached a hand down, gave him a soft nudge with her toe.

"C'mon, you gotta pee?"

"Not with you I don't."

"Oh sweetheart, the days of false modesty are long past. Who you thinks been dragging your ass to the latrine every couple hours? But if you think you can get up and get there without falling on your face, by all means, give it your best shot."

She was right and he knew it but he by no means had to like it.

"Well you don't gotta be so MEAN about it."

Amazingly, she laughed.

"You've been telling me I'm mean right along. I thought it was the fever but you're clear now so...hell, maybe I'm mean. Come on, get up. It's ok, I've seen it."

Scowling, he let her help him up...and hold him up much to his chagrin, as the sudden change in position grayed him out for a minute.

"If you say you told me so..."

"No such words will pass my lips."

There was no laugh in her voice.

" Just let me know when you're good to walk."

"I'm good."

"Y'know..."

She let him go once he had his legs under him, ready to steady him if he needed it but willing to let him be.

"I'm not trying to embarass you. I just don't want you to keel over."

He didn't answer, didn't have the breath, could only nod, grateful enough when he saw the latrine....it was a normal enough looking bathroom, albeit lacking plumbing...with a seat he could sit on, swallow his manhood and piss like a girl. 

"Think you could wait out there?"

"Sure. Do yourself a favor. Sit and tuck."

For someone who wasn't trying to embarass him she was doing a damn good job of it and he felt his ears start to burn.

Fine, he could play her game.

"That was already the plan."

Shrugging, she left him to it and he shook his head, knowing he was being a little ridiculous, that she had, as she'd said, seen it...probably seen a lot more than that now that he thought about it...but damn. 

So much for shunning people. His brilliant plan an epic fail, he'd managed to get himself kidnapped and coddled without any effort at all on his part.

It wouldn't end well. It couldn't, and as he made his way back out of the room he felt helpless tears...tears he didn't understand...sting his eyes.

These were good people, he knew that the way he knew his own soul. They'd helped him and they'd continue to help him until he didn't need it anymore. That they thought they needed him was laughable. They were doing better than he was, he had nothing to offer.

Still, if they'd done all this for him he'd have to at least do what he could. Do what he could, get attached, and then they'd die...the way everyone did in this world because there was no saving anyone. He'd fail them and they'd die..the way Merle had died...and he'd be on his own again.

Better if they'd left him up the tree. Left him in the hole.

Better, more merciful, if they'd just let him die.

 

Aware, dimly, that a lot of this bullshit self pity was exhaustion, hunger, the last dregs of what he knew now had been a damn near mortal illness...that it would clear itself out with food and sleep and the demands of being alive in this world, the seeds of truth remained.

He'd been lonely. And he'd be lonely again.

He wanted to push away the hand she offered, wanted to stop the tears now washing the remaining grease from his eyes, wanted to shun the brief comfort she offered..nothing clingy, nothing horrible, just her hand squeezing his in some kind of mute understanding...succeeded at none of it. 

He let her help him back to bed, let her help him lie down because every muscle in his body now was trembling with weakness, let her wipe the remains of the eye ointment and tears from his face, accepted her hand holding his.

He was too tired to do anything else, and too unexpectedly heartbroken.

This, then, was what would kill you in this world. Before the zombies, before the evil people just waiting to kill you and take what you had, before sickness, before starvation, before the elements...there was this.

This, the most dangerous thing out here of all.

The one thing that would kill you quicker than anything this world could throw at you.

Kindness.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryls frustration takes him to a new...dark..place.

He pretended not to hear her, knowing it'd be good for a giggle if he could make her think she'd scared him.

The kid was twisted, probably what he liked about her when he really thought about it, and since the first time he'd seen her he'd just about jumped out of his skin...with a wholly inappropriate "What the FUCK is that!" that he still felt guilty about but seemed to have delighted her....she'd done her damndest to scare him again.

 

He played along, knowing he was the only one who would, and if that wasn't a damn shame well..not a hell of a lot was.

Given that she set a massive guilt rolling in him every time he saw her, the only atonement he could seem to come up with for his gut feeling that they shouldn't even be keeping her alive was his participation in her little game, and it was a small enough thing to give her.

Now, pitch black notwithstanding, he knew she was scooting herself around so that some part of her could brush against his bare foot...bare because he still, even two weeks down the line, couldn't tolerate shoes....and he smiled to himself in the dark little room he'd taken as his own...he couldn't stand sleeping in that communal space, listening to the snores, cries, farts and moans of his companions...didn't want them listening to his...waiting for her touch, ready with a jump and a yell...ready for the giggle..or at least he thought it was a giggle. 

The sounds she made were really out there for anyone to translate, and while he felt he had her pretty well down he had to concede some ignorance.

When you were talking about someone without a brain, well..god knew.

Though he didn't quite buy that diagnosis.

But here it came...this time the top of her head, evidenced by the coarse mop top that stung the bottom of his foot, and his startled little yelp, this time, was equal parts pain and play.

He waited for the happy little sound, got it...and then spoke into the darkness, a tone of faint scolding in his voice.

"You want to give me a heart attack, girl, that's fine, but you gotta watch the feet."

An agreeable little chirrup of a sound came back at him and he sighed and reached for the camplight, switched it on, took a look at her.

Sad fucking sight, and he shook his head.

"You're more a mess than I am, you know that? That's a hell of an accomplishment cuz I am one fuck of a mess."

He'd taken to talking to her....conversations with the other three...and he knew them now...Tucker, who'd owned this place before the world fell apart...an old fort transformed into a hidden survivalist compound....almost completely buried, stocked with everything imagineable, and very close to invisible, Devin and Jill, brother and sister and how they'd come to be here none of them had explained and he hadn't cared enough to ask...both smart, quick, clever...and dangerously soft hearted....knew them and found himself singularly unimpressed that three people so intelligent and resourceful could be so naive and stupid...consistently frustrating.

They just didn't get it. 

If asked to define "it" he'd have been hard put to come up with a definition, most likely would have shrugged it off anyway, but whatever it was, they didn't have a grasp. 

The kid was better. She listened, or at least he thought she did, and she made all the right noises in all the right places. 

"Take this place, Bells.."

That he'd created a dimminutive for her had slipped his notice...her name, Isabella, bigger than she was.

"Tight as a goddamned drum but they can't keep the fucking door shut to save their lives. Or yours. Or mine. They're in and out like crackheads at a drivethrough and one of these days somebody's gonna see 'em."

It was true. Stir crazy as bugs in a box...something he could easily relate to...they couldn't just stay in, but they had it all backwards and tended to stay inside when everything outside seemed peaceful, heading out at the first sign of activity around their compound...stupid, because if you didn't know the place was there you wouldn't know the place was there...until people popped up under your nose.

He'd tried to tell them.

If people wanted in, they'd get in. Didn't matter how tight the place was, there was always a way in if you were determined enough and people nowadays...well..they were. Better to put out the fire, turn out the lights..not that the lights were visible from outside but still...and hunker down until activity in the clearing faded away.

They ignored him.

So far they'd been lucky, if you could call saddled with him and his damn feet lucky, but he was the exception and he knew it. Most people would shoot them where they stood and take everything they had.

People.

He knew he had to get away from them. Just as soon as he could do more than limp around.

"Tell you what, Bells. If anyones gonna get me killed it's goddamn well gonna be me."

He didn't get the conversational little sound he expected and aimed the light at her, taking in the tension in her little body, the pain on her face.

"What's wrong with you, girl?"

He knew she couldn't answer him.....in all liklihood any communication he thought they had was all in his head anyway. Devin had told him, after that first heart stopping, skin crawling encounter with her...she'd come wriggling into the room on her back, unidentifiable as anything remotely resembling a child, twisted, tiny, arms and legs wasted, contorted, sticklike..hands and feet almost fetal, head huge, tufts of black hair growing in tufts and clumps above bulbous, froglike eyes...she appeared to be nothing so much as a wiggling bundle of sticks and rags, the sounds coming from her an assortment of snuffling groans that sounded too much like the dead outside.

No brain...that was what Devin had told him.

Just a brain stem, just enough to keep her alive. Couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't chew, swallow, speak...think. How she was able to wiggle around was a mystery but it was what she did so they just let her do it. 

A tube stuck out from under the rag they called a shirt, hooked somehow into her stomach and they poured infant formula, instant breakfast, whatever instant nutrition drinks they had on hand or could scavenge down the tube a few times a day and kept her going.

A roomfull of diapers kept her covered.

He'd believed them, at first. That she had no awareness, no working sensory processes and he'd lost his filter completely, still insanely guilty now that he knew better...or thought he did... that he'd popped off with "Jesus christ people, why are you even keeping her alive?!" right in front of her.

It'd been shock more than anything, because even though the fact was she would never survive on her own, probably wouldn't survive anyway, he knew he'd have been no more able to starve her to death than kill her outright.

And telling Devin that his only child was a useless waste of resources...even if he already knew it..hadn't been any kind of way to foster a good relationship between them and things now were tense, at best.

 

That was fine with him. More and more it seemed to him that Devin was a flat out idiot. 

A lot moreso than his supposedly brainless daughter, who appeared, once Daryl caught on to just how she did things, to have a lot more going on in the smarts department than her father did.

And she was no more blind..or deaf..than he was. Oh he supposed her habit of following him around could be attributed to vibrations or smell or some other sense firing off, and it certainly seemed unlikely she could see, what with her eyes wandering everywhere but at what was in front of her, but.....she was too accurate. 

No...she could see. And she could absolutely hear. 

 

It hadn't been long before he'd realized he liked her, and she'd stopped looking less like some creature from a nightmare and more like..well...a little girl. 

Neglected and filthy but yeah....weren't they all.

Now though, something was bothering her...and he'd seen it before...pointed it out to them only to have them shrug it off as unimportant.

Pain, he could see that much. Discomfort. 

"Girl, you look like you're fixin to puke. You think you gotta pick my room to do it in?"

He heard the step in the doorway even as he finished the sentence, heard Devins voice float into the dimness as he turned the light up.

"She can't, dont' worry about it."

"What you mean she can't?"

"She can't. Nothing works between her mouth and her stomach. Nothing can go down, nothing can come up. Don't ask me, I don't get it. It's not connected right, or doesn't have any outlet or something. That's why she drools....nowhere for the spit to go. That's what that reek is, by the way. I heard you ask the other day."

"What is."

"Spit."

"Spit don't smell."

"Yes it does."

He came the rest of the way in, eyeing his daughter briefly with a sigh and turning his attention to Daryl.

"Let's see your feet. Tuck found some stuff in the back he thinks might help."

"Aint nothin gonna help but gettin up and walking on them."

"Which you won't do."

Now that was goddamned irritating, because what the fuck did this kid think he was doing every time he put those goddamn shoes back on and trudged around this place? 

"Yeah, alright. You go on and think that. What've you got?"

"Benzoin. Tuck says it'll toughen up the skin. Just be aware that if you put it anywhere it's open it'll burn."

He took the bottle Devin held out to him. "I just rub it on or what?"

"He said pat it on. Let it dry. Daryl, what you said the other day about supplies..and hunting?"

"Yeah?" He was surprised the kid remembered. He'd blown him off, sure as shit. Didn't want to hear it. It was just good sense. Why use up your stored supplies when the woods were full of game? They wanted to get out and move, hunting up fresh food was the best way he could think of to do that. Functional, practical....and something you did when there weren't people around. The storerooms here were full of weapons and while most were too noisy there were half a dozen good compound bows and enough bolts to last years. 

When they'd admitted they had no idea how to use them he'd offered to teach them, receiving nothing but vague, neutral grunts in reply.

Maybe they'd just needed time to think about it.

"You really know how to use the bows?"

And there....there it was, from the floor, drawing his glance, a derisive little chirp. Ha.

"I know, Bells. I know."

He turned his attention back to Devin.

"You know that thing I had tied to the tree with me is a bow, right?"

Another little sound, this one almost certainly a laugh, and he looked at her again.

"Girl, don't be rude."

"Why do you talk to her?"

"Because she listens and she doesn't ask stupid questions...ow..fuck, girl, what!"

This as her foot connected solidly with the bottom of his, seemingly a random motion but nothing of the sort, he knew. She'd had to spin herself around to do it, it was no accident.

Damn but it fuckin hurt. 

"What! You tellin me I'm rude, is that it? Well fuck."

He pulled his foot in, eyeing Devin, who's gaze rested speculatively on his daughter.

"Y'know, it does seem like she answers you."

"She does answer me."

"She never has me."

"Well..."

He got up, limping across the room to put the bottle on a shelf and reached into a dark little recess in the wall, pulling out the cigarettes he'd found stashed in an unused storeroom.

"If you treated me like I was a turnip I wouldn't talk to you either."

He lit it up, dragged deep, handed it to Devin unasked. 

"I'll teach you how to use the bows."

He took in Devins nod, looking back down at Bella, back to that uncomfortable writhing that told him clearly she was in pain...and decidedly green around the gills.

"What're you gonna do about her?"

"What."

"Man, look at her. She's sick..."

"No she's not, Jill just fed her. She's always like that, after. I don't know why."

This kids powers of observation were abysmal.

"Well you ever think maybe you're like...overfilling her? Cuz she looks like she wants to puke, man."

"Like I said, don't worry about it. She can't."

"Too bad for her, you think you'd want to be filled up more'n you could hold?"

He saw anger flash in the kids eyes, now.

Good. Let him get mad. He was too damned apathetic. 

"Daryl, I've managed to keep her alive for 9 years, gimme some credit."

"She's NINE?!"

"Yeah."

"Man, she looks two! Not a great job you're doin, huh?"

The kid just shrugged, apathy back in place. 

"You don't know anything about it. Either way there's nothing I can do about it now. She'll quit that in a little while. If it bothers you I'll take her out."

"Won't do no good, she'll just come back in. Besides the point anyway."

"Mmm. You think she's in pain and it bothers you. Nothing I can do about it, and chances are she's not. I mean, as far as I've ever been able to tell she doesn't feel anything anyway. I've seen her get her hands and feet slammed in doors and she didn't even notice. She never cries. Never has, not even when she was a baby. I used to think I'd see her laugh, but the school told me it's just random. Involuntary. Not real. She's just there, Daryl. No point in dwelling on it."

"If that aint some shit, right there. Man, people done fucked with your mind if you think all that. All you got to do is look at her to see that..."

"Known her all her life, Daryl. It is what it is. And if I bother you don't ever talk to Tucker about her. He'll really piss you off. He comes around a few times a day to check to see if she's still alive. Says he's not sure there'll be any noticeable difference except that she might get up and walk."

"Man, what the fuck is wrong with you, sayin shit like that in front of her!"

"She doesn't understand me, Daryl. Get it into your head. You sit around and talk to her and imagine that all her weird little noises are communication. I used to do the same thing. Believe me...they're nothing. She has no idea what's going on. Look, Daryl.... it's not your problem."

Well he had that right, anyway. None of these people were and the sooner he could get away from them the better.

He didn't bother to answer and it didn't take the kid a minute to realize the conversation was over and be on his way.

At least about that he was quick. 

Turning back to the little girl lying on his floor, though, he was helpless to stop turning the thought over.

What would happen if she died?

WOULD she get up and walk?

It was an interesting, horrible speculation and one with no point or use, and it didn't matter. What mattered now was that he had her in here, twisting around on the floor in a way that reminded him a little too forcefully of a dying fish. 

Pain.

He felt his thoughts colliding..fighting with each other.

It was useless to keep her alive...a waste of supplies and energy and really not doing her any favors at all if she was as mindless as they said.

She wasn't, though. Couldn't be. Even his less than basic medical knowledge knew that people without a brain didn't survive. 

Why in fuck else did people who got their brains bashed in die, or end up comatose and dependent on machines to keep them going?

She kept herself going with the exception of the swallowing thing. She moved around..and it wasn't aimless. She moved with purpose. Yeah it was creepy, that weird back wiggle thing, but it got her where she wanted to go and he had no doubt she wanted to go where she went.

The proof was right there in front of him. Every time he took her out of his room she turned right around and went back in. 

And she followed him...he'd thought at first there was nothing to it but after he'd tripped over her half a dozen times he'd realized that she was just going to be under his feet wherever he was. 

He limped back to his bed and stretched out, leaning on one arm to look at her, watching through narrowed eyes as she spun herself around to look back at him.

Blind? Like hell. Oh she probably couldn't see WELL what with her eyes wandering around in different directions, but she could see. Jill had told him she oriented to sound, but that didn't explain why she didn't bump into anything. They all left shit all over the place and she never crashed into any of it.

And even if she WAS orienting herself somehow to sound, that showed she could think, didn't it?

She could think. He didn't doubt it for a minute, and there was the root of his discomfort.

She was in there.

Stuck.

But in there. 

The world had collapsed, the dead were walking, the living were even more dangerous. Only the strongest would survive, and this little being in front of him was far from viable.

She'd never survive on her own, and, unlike a normal child, she'd never be able to.

The rules of survival in this new world said not to waste any effort on her, she'd never be able to hold her own. She'd never be able to contribute to her own..or anyone elses...survival.

But she was in there. 

She was in there and she was HER....he'd seen her personality almost immediately. 

A thinking, clever, funny little being who was well aware of not only her own existence but theirs.

Did she know she was a liability?

Devin had said she was nine. Probably she wouldn't except that they all said it in front of her all the time.

Hell, even he'd said it in front of her, before he'd realized she understood every damn word.

Not the first time he'd said something stupid in front of someone, but for whatever reason it was still giving him grief. She'd clearly moved on...she fucking liked him and god alone knew why..but he hadn't. It bugged him, how easily he'd just taken a look, freaked out, and believed the people around him rather than take a minute to observe and come to his own conclusion.

He'd done it eventually, but in this world eventually would get you eaten. There wasn't any time to be stupid, not anymore. 

If nothing else, she was teaching him to open his goddamned eyes and pay attention to the details.

"Girl, you might just help me survive this clusterfuck."

He sat back up, looked at her again.

Details.

She was fucking filthy, and she stank. They all wasted some water keeping themselves relatively clean...clean enough to not reek out everyone else at least...but they didn't bother with her.

 

No clothes to speak of, she went around in the same torn, ragged out tshirt and a diaper...Tucker had told him she didnt' appear to get cold...that tube sticking out from under her shirt...really sticking out now since her belly looked like one of those starving kids he used to see on tv commercials, all distended and tight as a drum.  
It had to hurt.

It DID hurt. 

They poured too much shit down that tube and it hurt her.

If any of the rest of them ever overate to the point that their bellies stuck out like that they'd puke. It was a given.

She couldn't, so she just had to suffer with it...

"Oh for fuck sake!"

It was so simple he couldn't believe nobody had figured it out...or maybe they had but since they figured she didn't feel anything they just didn't worry about it.

"Hang tight, Bells, I got this."

He hauled himself up, trying not to flinch every time his feet touched the floor, and stumbled out into the main room.

"Devin, gimme an empty jug or somethin."

"What for?"

"Ima fix your kid."

"Whattaya mean fix her?"

"Just gimme a damn jug."

"They're over there, go get one."

"Asshole."

"Yeah well, you need to walk."

"You're still an asshole."

He got it himself, headed back into his room, Devin...curious..following behind.

"What're you gonna do?"

"Shut up."

He knelt down next to the little girl...trying not to sigh in relief as the weight came off his feet...and reached for the tube sticking out of her shirt....rapidly developing powers of observation telling him immediately that what he had in mind wouldn't work with her lying there.

Gravity.

"Devin, pick her up."

"Why?"

"Pick her up!"

Sighing, the kid complied, skepticism clear on his face.

"Daryl.."

"Shut up."

He pulled the tube out again, held it up against gravity and uncapped the end, wincing a little at both the disagreeable smell that came from it, and at how dirty it was...hell the thing went inside her, the least they could do was keep it clean...and stuck the open end into the jug, lowering it until he heard liquid begin to flow.

His eyes went to her face, watching, waiting.

"Daryl, how much you gonna drain out?! She's...."

"When she unsquinches her face I'll cap it back up."

"Daryl..."

"Shut up."

He didn't take his eyes off her....watched her face start to relax, saw the tension in her belly ease up.

Nodding, he flipped the end of the tube up, grimacing a little as hot liquid ran over his hand, capped the end and sat back.

"Well, that was digusting. Do us all a favor and don't fucking dump so much shit into her. I don't want to fucking do that again. How stupid are you both that you....y'know what? Fuck it."

He turned his back on them both, inexplicably irritated with her as well and, limping badly now, crossed to the pot of steaming water always on the fire and dipped a ladle into it, sluicing the water over his hand, hissing a little at the burn as he stared into the fire, mind going dark.

Fire.   
Warmth.  
Shelter.  
Food and water. Weapons.

This place...as badly as he wanted out, he couldn't deny it was a smart place to spend the winter. And if it were just him here....just him...he didn't doubt it would remain unnoticed and unmolested, a safe haven for a long time. This winter. Another. Another still...

These people were stupid. Devin and Jill were stupid and dangerously soft hearted. Good people, no doubt, but walking, talking liabilities.

Tucker...Tucker was stupid and mean. And dangerous. He suffered them all but the day would come when he wouldn't. When he'd put them out of his place, or...more likely...just kill them in their sleep.

A different kind of liability.

Bella....

His mind shied away from that, unwilling to look at it, took him back to it's dark beginning.

Fire.  
Warmth.  
Shelter.  
Food and water. Weapons.  
Survival.

He turned to look at them again, eyes narrowed and speculative, vision gone odd and flat, the boy no longer just another uncertain survivor in this fucked up world but something ugly and diseased....a boil to be lanced and taken from the skin of this new existence....a curious blank where the little girl rested in the boys arms...suddenly no longer on his radar he knew she was there but found he couldn't...quite...see her...and he wondered, not for the first time, just how far from sanity he was.

Abruptly afraid of what he could...might...be capable of, he limped past them and back into his little dark room, digging into the wall for a cigarette, lighting it with hands that shook more than a little and throwing himself down onto the bed.

He needed to stop thinking, needed to shut off his mind...violence and hate bubbling up in it like some noisome, hot spring and his gut churned at the driven need that kept roiling to the surface, triggered in some unfathomable way by that boys ignorance, cycling it's way back to the top again and again.

If he wanted to survive, he had to get away from these people. 

Until he could walk he couldn't leave them.

If they were gone, he'd be safe here, and for a very...very...long time.

He'd told the kid he'd teach them how to use the bows.

He could do that.  
He could.  
Or.  
He could take this place.


	8. Chapter 8

He came up gasping, struggling in the dark, chest tight, breath caught in a throat closed in terror...this time both hands raised above his head, caught in the act...unspeakable violence.

Unspeakable.  
Unthinkable.

His throat opened on a surge of vomit and he ran for it, feet leaving bloody prints in his wake but he made it...barely...tossing up what little he'd managed to force down that night into the latrine, flooding him with even more guilt.

Not only was he forcing down food provided by people he wanted to kill...and it was all he could do to swallow it in the first place....but he was wasting it as well.

 

Night after night, each night bloodier than the rest. If he didn't get away from them....another surge of nausea hit, and damn if he didn't feel like he might just be turning inside out. 

Behind him, he heard the makeshift door open, felt his hands clench into fists, nails digging crescents into his palms.

"Daryl?"  
Fuck. Great. Jill.  
"Leave me be."

It was all he could do to get the words out, and he knew she'd stay. 

"Daryl, again? This is every night..."

He felt her hand on his arm, felt it reach to touch his face and pulled away. 

"Don't."  
"Daryl, if you're sick..."  
"Aint sick."

He was fighting to catch his breath, to get his shit together and answer her coherently enough that she'd go the fuck back to bed before he hurt her.

"S'just a dream. Nightmare. Go on, leave me be."  
"Must be one hell of a dream."

Yeah it was, and it wouldn't do her any good to know what it was...how every night he came closer and closer to killing her, tonight he'd finally done it...waking up tonight on the vision of his arms slicked with gore to the elbows, their broken bodies on the floor at his feet, all of them, ripped apart...

He gagged again, turned away from her and spat out a mouthful of slimey spit, shoving her hand away. Was she blind? Could she not SEE it?

"It was. It is. Just...leave me be."

He pushed past her, limped to the fire and pulled out a dipper of steaming water, dumping it into a cup and slugging a mouthful, ignoring her wince...she knew how hot that water was, how much it had to have burned...rinsing away the taste in his mouth, spitting into the drain in the floor.

"Daryl, maybe if you talked about it..."  
"Aint nothin to talk about. It's just a dream."  
"It's not just a dream. Jill, go on back to bed. Daryl...it's not just a dream, is it."

Great, now that asshole was up, too.

"Yeah, Tucker. It is. Would y'all just lay off and go back to sleep? So I can?"

He started for his little dark room, halted in his tracks by Tuckers next words, as lazy and laconic as ever, chilling in their content.

"What're you dreaming about, Daryl? Anything we should be worried about?"

He stopped, turned, taking in the false lack of concern in Tuckers stance.

Oh, he sat there relaxed enough, playing with those stupid white boy dreds, face unconcerned, but there was a slyness in his eyes...

"S'just a dream, Tucker. You don't have nightmares?"

"I do. But they don't make me puke. They don't drive me into isolation, you think we don't notice you've taken yourself away?"

If that wasn't some sorry shit, right there.

He heard his voice rising. 

Good. Maybe he could beat the fuck outta this stupid hippie and get some peace.

"Aw, I ain't done shit...isolation....who's teachin your sorry asses how to use those bows, huh?!Who's goin out there every day and showin you what you can and can't eat?! Who's teachin you how to hunt?!"

He was getting wound up now, and fine, maybe this was what he needed.

"Who's showin you how to make arrows! And nets! How to filter water!"

He moved into Tuckers space, face not an inch away, and it crossed his mind that the boy had to be plumb crazy to not back down...hell he didn't even look worried.

"Who stopped YOUR sorry ass from eatin from a bunch of cans ready to fuckin explode, who was that?"  
"Oh, I know, Daryl."

His voice didnt rise, stayed as soft and lazy as ever.

"You do what you think you have to do, but then you hide. You barricade yourself away from the rest of us. You don't let yourself be alone with anyone, not even Bella."  
"She don't even fuckin come near me anymore."  
"I know. Why do you think that is?"  
"I don't fuckin know, cuz she's smarter than you are and knows when I want to be left alone!"  
"Or she knows she can't trust you. Get outta my face, Daryl, unless you really think you could stop if you hit me."

And there it was, right there, truth like a smack in the face.

He hadn't hit him..wouldn't hit him.

Oh, he wanted to. Would have...

But Tucker was right.

If he started he didn't think he'd stop. And if he couldn't stop...it wouldn't end with Tucker.

"If you think I'm crackin, Tucker.."

He stepped away, turned his back, limping now back toward his room.

"You got some options. You can kill me. Be a stupid move till I've taught you what you need to know but you can do it."

He stopped, filled up a water bottle to take with him.

"You can throw me out. Another stupid move since I know where you are. OR..."

He shot a parting glance in Tuckers direction, as he disappeared into the dark.

"You can leave me be and I'll have my fucking nightmares and puke myself to death if it comes to that, but meanwhile I'll teach you all the rest of the stuff you wanted to learn and my feet'll heal up and I can move the fuck on, no harm. No foul. It's on you, Tuck. And if you want the truth..I don't much give a fuck which option you go with."


	9. Chapter 9

It was killing him. 

Nothing figurative about it, it was killing him.

Slowly, by inches...a little piece of him dying every time one of them spoke to him, touched him, smiled at him. 

Tucker, that asshole, he knew. Knew and tortured him with it, his hail fellow well met, false bon homme' tearing at him....shredding him...so much worse than the eyes that met his every chance they got that said "I know what's in your mind. I know what you're thinking about."

He knew he should go. Feet or no feet, and honestly they were about as good as they were gonna get till he got back out there and wore them thick again. 

Knew he should go before this insanity finally took him and he acted on it. 

Knew he should. Couldn't. Not when they were still so....unprepared.

Wasn't his responsibility, he knew that, and now, trecking through black tunnels he no longer needed eyes to see, so familiar was he with every crack beneath his feet, every turn in the darkness, he wondered how much longer he'd be able to convince himself that there was anything more he could do for them.

How much longer he'd spend trying to expiate the sin of these murderous thoughts by trying to teach them to survive when all he had to do to find peace was leave.

Or kill them.

How much longer?

He didn't eat their food anymore. Couldn't. It wouldn't stay down, his guilt tossing it back almost before he'd fully swallowed it, and while he knew on some distant level he should be concerned about how fast his weight was dropping...well...he really wasn't. 

Didn't sleep much anymore and when he did, when exhaustion just took him down, he did it where they couldn't find him....and he'd heard them talking about it, trying to figure out, when they thought he was gone, thought he couldn't hear them, where he went at night. Hell, where he went all day. The only time they saw him now was when he was working with them, showing them...teaching them....

He just vanished.

They'd combed every inch of the place...

Just more proof of how ill preparted to survive they were. 

His toe touched on a step and he nodded to himself, hand sliding against cold steel in the darkness, fingers slipping with practiced ease into the gap, finding the hidden latch, pushing the door open onto dim, cold light.

Winter light. Winter air. 

Outside just a few steps away.

He hadn't told them...and every time his eyes met this light his guilt surged.

They needed to know. Needed to know that there was another way into their compound. Another way out.

Oh, it wasn't likely anyone would get in this way, and as he unlocked the chain holding the steel barred door closed he mentally counted...as he always did, each and every time he came up here...the flush steel doors behind him. There were 12. 12 doors...and at least a couple of miles of tunnel...between those stupid, naive, sweet, trusting people back in that fort and this unknown egress to the outside world he was keeping from them. 12 doors that lacked latches on either side, set flush with the stone walls.

Doors that only opened out and he'd had one hell of a cold night the first time he'd done this, never for a moment expecting that he wouldn't be able to go back in the same way he'd come out.

He'd spent the night in the locked entry...safe enough but dangerously cold, ironically enough that freezing sleep the best he'd had in weeks, and it wasn't until later that he'd realized it was because he knew the people inside were safe from him...until the first hint of dawn broke the darkness and he left the safety of a locked cage and trecked back to the fort.

Nearly frozen, he'd waited, hidden, and slipped back inside, silent and invisible, as Jill had come out. She hadn't seen him, hadn't heard him, hadn't known he was there, and the rush of conflicting emotion...aching pity and homicidal contempt all soaked in the massive guilt that never left him now...had threatened to undo him. He'd wanted to hug her....teach her....show her he was there and how easily he'd slipped by her....wanted to kill her for her ongoing stupidity, her refusal to pay attention to anything he tried to show her.

But had he really shown her?  
He wasn't sure.   
He wasn't sure at all.

He stepped out, locked the bars behind him, checking, as he always did, their visibility.

Almost impossible to see, this old entrance to what he was almost certain had been a munitions bunker...connected to miles of tunnel system... sat hidden behind years...decades in all likelihood...of overgrowth. The chain and lock holding them closed had been rusted solid...and he'd replaced them with new ones from Tuckers storeroom, the key as good as attached to his body....and in the little entry there had been no graffitti, no cigarette butts, no empty bottles. No used condoms, no human detritus.

Nobody had known this place was here. 

Good.

Unknown. Invisible. Close to inpenetrable..though when he was outside it became accessable... a vulnerability that made him uneasy for the people inside. 

If someone found the entrance while he was outside and got past the lock they'd be able to get through the doors, and sure there was no light, and a veritable labyrinth of tunnels..he'd explored them all and most of them were sealed off. Dead ends. A person could be lost for weeks in there....but still..if they got in while he was out they'd be able to go through those doors...rigged as they were so that he himself could get through them...and they could conceivably find the fort. 

Unlikely. Possible.

It bothered him. Made him uneasy but...he had to be able to get back in. 

Why?  
He asked himself every day. Why did he have to get back in? Why didn't he just leave?  
He asked himself...but he had no answer. None at all. He didn't know why he kept going back. Why he didn't just pack up his stuff and go.  
It wasn't the shelter they offered...he wasn't using it. It wasn't the food. He wasn't eating it. It wasn't the company because he avoided all but necessary contact. 

He guessed it was because he was still trying to teach them...but....was that what he was trying to do?

He shouldered his bow, slipped off into the woods...in his mind it was to hunt, to find food he could keep down...but his soul knew the deeper truth.

He had to stay away from them.

Had to stay away because lately he'd been...confused. 

Twice now he'd caught himself making mistakes...strange, puzzling mistakes he couldn't really understand...and stopped them at the brink of some lethal mishap. 

The first time had been the soup...made with plants he'd shown them were edible...had checked when they'd brought them back and given the nod to.  
He'd smelled something wrong when it was cooking, had tried to pass off the growing unease as nothing, finally unable to stand it and stopping them from touching it.  
Something had been off, and he hadn't been sure what, but that smell...it wasn't safe to eat. He'd made some kind of mistake.

But.

He didn't make those mistakes. He'd been feeding himself out of the woods for his entire life and he'd NEVER made that kind of mistake.

He wasn't sure it had been a mistake.

The second time had been the arrows...

He'd inspected every arrow they made, checked and double checked, corrected their mistakes and then sent them out to use them.  
They'd come back complaining that more than half of them had broken off in the bow.  
Annoying when you were looking for food, lethal if you were trying to protect yourself, and when he'd checked the broken ones they'd brought back he'd seen why....but....he'd checked them.

He'd checked them and hadn't..what. Hadn't noticed?

He didn't make that kind of mistake either, and it was then that he'd come to not trust himself at all. 

It was then that he'd started sleeping in the bunker, and though he knew he could still get to them...get AT them...he didn't think his subconcious would make the effort...and at least they wouldn't try to wake him up and get strangled for their trouble.

Concious of this lethal impulse he had no explanation for, he'd become obsessive in his efforts to check himself and was catching himself now, over and over and over, about to tell them something dangerously off, show them something that would never work, teach them something that would fail. 

He'd corrected these almost mistakes and he'd been sure the corrections were accurate, but the fact that it was happening at all was wrecking him, the continual adrenaline flooding his system causing his heart to race nearly every waking moment, exhaustion dogging his very existence, breath short in his chest, acid burning his throat, weight falling off, strength depleted...

But he couldn't leave them. Could'nt leave them until he'd finished what he'd started, and whether that was teaching them to survive or killing them he wasn't sure anymore. And he could tell himself all he wanted that he had no idea what it was about but he did.

He did.

Stubborness. 

That was what it was.

He was staying here, fighting himself and putting them all in danger because he was too goddamn stubborn to let himself be defeated.

This crazy shit...it was just another symptom. No different than that suicidal impulse that had taken him over right after he'd lost Merle. No different than the flu or whatever it was that had sickened him before he'd met these people. A symptom of the sickness the world had become.

Survival.

That was all it was.

It was his survival instinct telling him he had to do whatever it was he had to do to survive and there was no longer any right, no longer any wrong...there was just survival. He'd seen that these people were a liability...and that survival sense had activated. That primal need to LIVE...to eliminate each and every threat to his continued existence fighting to take over the part of him that was still human. The part of him that was still Daryl. The part of him that wouldn't hurt these people, or steal from them, but would show them how NOT to be liabilities.

But they were competition. Even if he could teach them. They needed food. Water. Shelter. And whatever they used was more he didn't have.

This setup they had was ideal. Damn close to perfect except for their stupidity that threatened to expose it, anyway. He could live here...just himself....for years. Hell, for a lifetime. But they'd ruin it. It was just a matter of time. More people in and out simply meant more chances of exposure. Someday someone would see one of them and then....

If he wanted to survive, it couldn't be with them.

And Tucker was dangerous. Tucker was just like him. Biding his time. He could see it in him.   
And Tucker KNEW.  
He knew. Didn't make him any fucking smarter, knowing...and he WAS stupid....didn't know about the tunnels. Didn't know about the other entrance. Only knew what was in Daryls head. Knew because it was in his own head. And of course that was another reason Daryl was sleeping in the bunker. Tucker couldn't get at him. Couldn't kill him in his sleep....not that it would be an easy thing to do even if he COULD sleep...and would be damned near impossible now that he really didn't, but still...better safe than sorry. 

If nothing else, Tucker had to go. 

And none of this was getting him anywhere. He wasn't hunting, he was dog boning all of this bullshit in his head and all it was doing was giving him a fucking headache.

Fuck it. 

He started back, thinking that maybe sleep was the thing today..sometimes it was..sometimes it was all there was...but it didnt feel right. It was too fucking cold, for one thing...it was cold in the bunkers, and the sleeping bag he found didn't help much when he remembered that fireplace in the common room of the fort.

Hell of a situation. Couldn't hunt, too distracted. Couldn't sleep...too cold. Couldn't....anything.

What.

Jerk off.   
Fat chance, there hadn't been so much as a tingle down there in months and he didn't give a fuck if there ever was again.

Read a book.

He almost laughed at that one. Here he was, stomping around the woods contemplating the loss of his sanity, fighting the urge to kill everyone he was with, and suddenly his brain says "Read a book."

Read a book.  
Read.  
A book.  
Book.  
Books.  
He froze, suddenly, what his mind was trying to say to him suddenly diamond bright.

He had books.  
He had them because he'd found them...tripped over them actually....sneaking back into his private subdivision after everyone had gone to sleep, he'd found a book lying there in the dirt at the entrance to the dead end that led to the bunkers.

He'd found others, scattered here and there throughout the fort, lying on the floor in random, bizarre places only he ever bothered with.

But...he'd found one at the dead end.

He'd thought nothing of it at the time, just picked it up as he did the others and brought it with him, because he actually did like to read and it did take him away from his head for a while and he'd been grateful to find it...but....

Now.

Books, in places only he went.  
One at the entrance to a place only he knew about.

Left for him?

His body slammed to defcon 5 in a blink, his survival suddenly sharply in focus.

Someone left him a book.

Such a benign thing to feel like such a threat.

But if someone left him a book, someone knew where he was going.


	10. Chapter 10

He felt a little silly, he had to admit. Silly. Even as he waited for his heart rate to settle into something like human, for his nerves to quit jangling.

He'd panicked, no two ways about it, and when he thought about it now a sick sort of shame rose up in him that he'd ever dared to judge anyone elses ability to survive.

As far as he was concerned, the fact that he'd been inside relatively safe walls while blundering around in a panic was the only thing that'd saved him. Had he been outside he'd have been zombie bait in a flat minute.

Of course, the fact that his version of blundering was anyone elses cautious observation never really occurred to him. 

At least it had been until tonight, when everything had almost gone as horrendously balls up as it was possible to go.

They'd all come within an ace of ceasing to exist, tonight, and how in fuck had it come to that?

He'd abandoned the bunkers for the time being, horrified at the thought that someone knew about them, knew he was there, and could get at him...and he was damn well going to keep an eye on these people.

Thinking about it now...comfortable on his bed, propped against the wall, one bare foot resting on the floor and waiting for the touch he knew....well, hoped....was coming.....he almost had to laugh at how this world had changed him. How something so small could cause such a horrendous reaction.

Before this, he'd have taken those books left where he could find them as gifts. Little kindnesses of the sort that had been habitual with him before the world fell apart, something he still practiced, here and there, as opportunity presented itself, and this time he did laugh, though it wasn't particularly happy, remembering the last opportunity. 

It'd begun with a fight, ended with a gift....gifting someone he was trying to decide whether or not to kill and what kind of freak had he become, anyway?

He'd been by the fire, too cold to hide in his tunnels, trying...not entirely successfully....to patch up an enormous rent in his pants and cursing both his fingers..which suddenly seemed too short, too stubby, too fat to be of any use, and his eyesight. 

Jill had noticed, had remarked, not unkindly but clearly amused.

"Daryl, you stick your nose much closer to those you're gonna end up stitching it to your pants."

He'd been less than charmed.

"Yeah, well...contacts are kinda hard to come by in the zombie apocalypse and I aint stumbled upon glasses I can see out of yet."

Her sound of surprise had startled him and he'd finally looked up at her, puzzled at the look of disbelief on her face.

"Daryl, you can see something...and hit it with an arrow..."

"bolt..."

"Whatever....half a mile away! You can see like nobodys business! What're you talking about?"

He'd nodded, gone back to what he was doing, cursing again.

"I can see far away just fine. Stuff like this though I got to hold it either farther away than I can reach, or put it right under my goddamn nose. Didn't used to be like that, vision started to go to hell a couple years back."

"How come?"

"Girl, you wanna leave me be?"

She'd been willing to change the subject, but not to shut up.

"We're almost completely out of coffee y'know."

She shook a nearly empty bag at him, frowning.

"I'm not so much worried about missing it as I am about the caffiene withdrawal that's gonna hit when it's gone. We'll all have massive headaches, probably be nauseated, super tired, won't be able to think. I see that being a problem."

He dropped his work in his lap, eyeing her with something just shy of contempt.

Really. Running out of coffee. A problem.

He'd always been a take it or leave it coffee guy...great when he had it, didn't much care when he didn't and now he raised an eyebrow at her.

"You really think runnin out of coffee is worth worrying about?"

That she was probably looking at her biggest worry and didn't even know it crossed his mind, and he dropped his eyes with a weird mental shiver. 

"Sure do."

She joined him at the little table, tin mug clutched in her hands.

"I used to be in a church that preached against coffee. I kicked it a couple of times thinking that was what God wanted me to do."

She shot a look at his snort, shook her head.

"Go ahead, whatever. I'm tellin you, I was never so sick in my life as I was the times I kicked coffee. The second time I googled it...and sure enough it's an actual withdrawal syndrome. The thing is....it makes it so hard to think. That seems.....so dangerous now."

"Yeah, well you got that right. If you knew that why'd you keep suckin the shit down? Coulda just weened yourself off it. Or did you think it'd never run out?"

That was the thing with these people. They didn't think.

"We had so much....anyway. Daryl. I mentioned it for a reason, not just to bitch."

"Yeah, what reason is that? I don't know how to grow coffee if that's what."

"Close, actually, but no. Is there anything out there that might replace it? That you know of? Some kinda plant that you can brew up and...."

"Nah, not that I ever heard of or had any need of."

He pushed back from the table abruptly and stood up.

"You got way bigger things to worry about than runnin outta coffee. You want my advice...the rest of what you got? Make it weak and cut way back now. Spread it out. Be fuckin smart for once." 

He'd retreated, closed her out, disgusted with her priorities, even more with her lack of foresight.

But....

It'd stayed in his head, and he'd been out....had rambled far from the fort, something he'd taken to doing more and more lately, and he half wondered if he was trying, as he'd suggested to her, to ween himself off it. 

To convince himself that long term survival was possible by some option other than the horror he was considering.   
That was the issue, of course. Long term. If he'd thought they were capable...that they'd last longer than another season...that they wouldn't bring death right down on all of their heads...he'd have been able to reasonably consider just joining them permanently. But....they were such liabilities. And Tucker....

And here he'd been, dog boning it in his head again, driving himself insane and it was getting pretty fucking cold and pretty fucking dark.

Time to find shelter for the night.

He'd found an old factory..locked tight and seemingly undisturbed, though of course you couldn't go by appearances anymore and christ fucking knew what might be in there.

It hadn't taken him five minutes to find a way in, and by the time full dark fell he was holed up in an office, brick walled and windowless, door locked and barricaded with a heavy oak desk. Safe.

Unless the place burned down in the middle of the night, unlikely but always possible he supposed and where in fuck did these thoughts come from anyway?

He hadn't slept....his head was too damn busy, it was too damn cold...and he found himself unaccountably worried for the people he'd left behind.

Worried for the people he wanted to kill....or didn't want to kill...or thought he should probably kill just to survive himself...or whatever the fuck it was he really wanted to stop thinking about it and what the fuck was wrong with his head? He thought THEY were stupid.

Disgusted with himself, he'd given up on any attempt at sleep and had let himself out of the office at first light and scavenged the place... slipping through the abandoned building like a ghost, seeing noone....none of the living and no sign of them...none of the dead.

Strange.

He'd found toilet paper...and there was a godsend he wasn't leaving behind for sure....but not much else, and had been about to leave when he'd passed through a huge set of double doors and into the factory proper and smelled it...at once on high alert, every sense ready to fight.

Coffee. 

Someone was here.

Someone was.....

But no, nobody was there. Nobody was making coffee at all, but he was, in fact, fully surrounded by the stuff. Bundled to ship bulk in huge burlap sacks, bundled to ship retail in cutesy little five and ten pound please reuse this sack in some artsy way or die bags that inexplicably pissed him off, vats of beans in various states of processing....halted now for damn sure but Lord he'd never seen so much coffee....or smelled it, and honestly it was pretty overwhelming. 

He bet it kept the dead away pretty damned good.

He'd turned to leave, a weird little pang of sadness dinging in his soul at the thought of all the people not getting up this morning and making coffee and taking it out to their porches, to their tables, to their couches and easy chairs.

Dead world.

Dead nicety.

Dead.

The little retail factory store, offset to the side and filled with coffee kitch caught his eye and he wandered in, riding the wave of sad nostalgia and for once just letting himself do it....shaking his head at the fridge magnets and key rings, mugs and trinkets...helping himself to tshirts, hoodies and hats, pocketknives, lighters and matches...about to pass over an old fashioned hand grinder when it dawned on him that the thing might work.

He'd taken it down, examined it, found it the real deal and stuffed it in his bag. A grinder would not be a bad thing to have.

He'd meant to take it and go.

He had.

Intentions.

Bullshit was what they were. When he'd slipped back into the fort ...almost twelve hours later and how keenly he was regretting his last impulse only his screeching muscles knew....he'd unloaded most of what he'd salvaged into the storeroom and gone to bed, sleeping this time from sheer and utter exhaustion, not even waking to Jills cry of surprised delight when she found the ten pound bag of coffee beans and the grinder on the table.

It'd been a stupid move on his part...that much weight, that long a hike...for someone he didn't even like and was afraid he'd kill.

For no reason other than he knew she'd be happy. It'd been a foolish move, a waste of time and energy and strength, entirely impractical and not a little schizophrenic. But....there wasn't much in the world to make anyone happy anymore, if something that small would do it, it almost seemed necessary to make it happen. 

Foolish sentiment.

He could...would....did do that...but he couldn't look at a book left where he could find it as the same kind of thing. No. No, the books were a warning, right? They had to be. A message.

"I know where you are and you can't hide and I can find you any time I want to."

A threat.

HE could leave a present for someone. No chance whatsoever anyone would leave one for him.

Someone was trying to tell him something, though now that he was, at least by apperances, back in the fold, the message seemed a little murky, and he'd begun to suspect he was a paranoid fool.

Books left for him, now on the floor next to his bed....no warning that someone knew where he was, because everyone knew where he was. They could see him. And what message could they possibly be sending? Welcome back?

It'd eaten away at him, left his nerves shredded, raw, screeching....nails bitten to the quick and bleeding, scalp worn bald in spots where he'd twisted and tugged at the hair until it bled....panic.

He'd waited. Watched...bags packed and stowed, ready to leave with absolutely no idea why he still stayed...

And then tonight....the night that would have, he knew, decided his actions one way or another...the most miserable night of his existence to that point...a night he'd lain awake with the flood of anxiety in his veins making his heart race to the point of pain, and sending waves of increasing chills, vertigo, nausea through his system in a screaming tide. Acid surging in his throat, chasing a welling panic that had his hands and feet tingling...no coherent thought in his head, just a black drive to end it, end it, end it....however he could. Get up and leave, get up and kill them, get up and kill himself. It had become a ricochet fast approaching terminal velocity in his head and he'd lain there shaking, sweating....crying, though he was unaware of it until later....on the verge of something unspeakable, hearing Tucker and Jill fucking in the common room, the sound insanely arousing in the midst of his internal ,storm forcing a set of simultaneous urges he couldn't reconcile along with everything else. Kill them. Fuck them. Get himself off. Hearing Devin's guttural little moans as he did exactly that, masturbating across the room from them and filling Daryl with violent hatred, equally violent desire....the edge of critical mass and he was going to get up, going to do something and even he had no idea what it was...the night that would have sealed all of their fates, one way or another....tonight...he had seen.

On the cusp of action, he'd been half off the bed, God only knew what was in his hands and even God didn't know what was in his head....blackness and despair and fear and he had no idea where he was going or what he was about to do...and...  
Something had moved.  
Something.  
Small, and dark and silent, a shadow detached from a wall and slithering toward him, inhuman and haunted....

He'd hesitated, frowned, his immediate impulse to stomp on it...kill it..staid by the fast vanishing point of sanity still lingering in his mind. A tiny point of recognition.

Bella.

He couldn't...wouldn't...stomp it because it was Bella and he couldn't....wouldn't...hurt her.

But Bella never came near him anymore.

Bella didn't trust him. 

He'd stared at her...her usual snakelike locomotion hampered in some way, off center, off kilter...halting and strange...and as the cries of passion in the next room reached a peak crescendo of oh fucks and oh gods and oh sweet fucking christs he barely heard her little grunts of effort.

Barely...but he heard them, and...confused...even scared...he reached for the latern, turned it on....and felt a wave of hopeless, helpless hysteria break over him...take him...shake him, and it was maybe here that he'd realized he was crying. That he'd cut bloody crescents into the palms of his hands, that he'd bitten completely through his bottom lip, his chin and neck a gory froth of blood...that the shrieking laughter mixed with sobs was coming from him at no more than a whisper that tore like a scream... even as he heard Jill scream in orgasm, heard Devin do the same....as Tucker laughed and Bella grunted in exertion....body curled around a book as she made her way across his floor.

Bella...painfully hauling books around curled against her side. For him. Message? Peace offering? Comfort?

Bella.

It'd taken him hours to stop shaking.

Sweat soaked and trembling, he'd chain smoked and stared at the little girl, frozen now on the floor beside his bed, everything about her screaming high alert. Waiting.

Waiting for him to decide what he was going to do.

Defenseless. Helpless. Not entirely trusting, he could see it in her, see it all over her.

He'd said nothing...not until he'd smoked himself sick and couldn't even consider lighting another one.  
Not until his hands had stopped shaking, until he'd stopped streaming sweat, stopped laughing, stopped crying, stopped raging inside his head.

Until he was sure he could speak, could move, without simply setting off a final homicidal rage and slaughtering every last one of them and then himself.

He'd had no idea what it was he was going to say, had nothing in his mind, was grateful only that his mind seemed to be returning and all of the blood on his hands appeared to be his own.

He'd crushed out the last cigarette, fighting down the urge to gag as he did it, and leaned forward, reaching a hand to touch the book she was still curled around.

"This for me?"

His voice had startled both of them, and he'd jumped a little at the sound as she uncurled and backed away.

Away, but not out. Staring at him, both eyes tracking him together with a monumental effort he immediately saw and understood, provoking a new little laugh and a fresh spate of tears.

"This mean you like me again?"

No answering hoot. No funky little Bella laugh. 

She'd just held that gaze on him, waiting...for him to settle or to get up and do whatever it was he'd been going to do.

"Not that at all, is it. Nah, I know what it is."

He did. She'd put herself between him and her family.

He'd nodded and felt a surge of nausea, a rush of spit in his mouth... swung out of bed, watching as she twisted her self to face him....not for a moment about to let him out of her sight...stepped carefully over her and out of the room, silent as a ghost through the now quiet common room, it's occupants sated and already snoring, slipped into the latrine and waited, while he pissed for what felt like an hour, to either throw up or get over it, finally feeling his internal systems begin to back down to something at least aquainted with normal, feeling his heart begin to steady, the pain in his chest start to fade....and the black haunted rage to receed to the back of his mind.

When he thought he could trust himself again he let himself out, crept back to his room where she still waited, all systems high, watching for his return, spinning like a top to keep him in sight as he crossed, stepped over her, bent to pick up the book she'd brought him...finally sinking down onto the bed in a state of such exhaustion he wondered, quite seriously, if he'd actually live through it...and how close he'd come to either giving himself a heart attack or going on a killing spree.

"Girl, I don't know about you, but I'd sell my soul for some goddamned xanax."

He'd heard a tiny little sound...barely there, but he'd heard it.

"Been you leaving me these, huh? And you knew where I was at. Shit."

He'd huffed out a disgusted snort.

"Don't know why I'm surprised, been thinkin right along that you're the only one here has any brains."

He'd let it be, then, stretched out, closed his eyes, tried to sleep....knowing already that he wouldn't....and had finally propped himself up, wrapped in his sleeping bag and as comfortable as only the truly exhausted can be and opened the book she'd brought him, one foot deliberately left on the floor.

He'd thought he'd only be pretending to read but he'd fallen into it, lost himself a little, and when he'd emerged...his foot was getting cold....he'd been careful to keep his eyes on the page, keep his voice quiet.

"I'm not gonna hurt you, Bella."

He'd paused, eyes on the page, finally adding quietly, "Or them."

There'd been no sound from her, and now he waited, half in the story, half in the room, hoping whatever sense she had that had let her know what was in his head, let her know what he was struggling with, let her know when his critical mass had been reached and fission was imminent, would now sound the all clear, and let both of them know that the danger had passed.

That he was waiting for reassurance that he wasn't going to freak out again from a little girl who'd never taken a step or spoken a word was clear in his mind, and while part of him condemned him for a fool he knew he trusted her judgement.

If she decided he was safe...he guessed he probably was. If she didn't...if she judged him and left him there...well, his bag was packed and he'd be out the door and gone before anything could happen.

So thinking, exhaustion finally won out and he began, finally, to doze...first nodding over the pages, hand going limp, book falling to his chest.

His breathing had just begun to lengthen, even out, fall into rythm...when the cold touch on his foot pulled him back.

He smiled a little, didn't open his eyes.

"Girl, you sure?"

He heard her little hoot...not a bit hesitant but quiet...serious....and he nodded.

"I know. I went a little bugfuck."

Another hoot. 

"Least you're speakin to me again, that's a good sign, right?"

He got no reply, just that icy hand on his foot, and he became aware now that he could feel her shivering.

Well hell, she was just a little girl. It didn't matter how big her balls were...and by now he was sure she had a set six times bigger than his...had to to have put herself between him and the rampant violence he'd been about to visit on them all....she was still just a little girl, and an incredibly fragile one at that...and it was damn cold in his room.

He didn't think she'd take an invitation...she'd never been cuddly with any of them that he'd ever seen, and the times they handled her through necessity she'd always appeared to hate it...but he was damned if he'd let her lay on that cold floor and shiver.

Her set might put his to shame, but he was still bigger.

He never so much as hesitated, reaching first to dial off the lantern, then to scoop her up..with a quick "Not gonna hurt you, just getting you warm." so he didn't scare her to death...ignoring the horrible rigid limpness her body always held....iron stiff but utterly disjointed she felt as if any motion at all would simply break her apart.

He didn't want to snuggle with her any more than she did with him, and he didn't attempt it, just zipped her into his sleeping bag, voice brooking no argument.

"Don't give me any hassle about it, girl, you're like to freeze to death down there and those yahoos in the other room got their itches all scratched and they won't wake up for nothin. Just go to sleep."

 

She was silent, freezing, nobodys fool, and he wrapped himself in another blanket as he felt her begin to relax...as the shivers tapered off and she became simply what she was....an exhausted little girl suddenly warm and comfortable..and with someone she trusted.

He felt her go soft, heard her soft little girl snores as she slipped under, and felt himself inordinately comforted. If she trusted him enough to go to sleep, he guessed he could too.

It wasn't over. He knew that.

The immediate crisis may have been averted but he knew nothing had been solved. Still....the insanity had left him, at least for now, and the only thing in his mind at the moment was how exhausted he was.

As he drifted off it crossed his mind to find out where she slept. If she had a bed...blankets...warmth....or if she just scooted around on the stones all night, freezing...

Sleep took him, and in his sleep his arm crept across that strange little girl...unconscious and instinctive...keep her warm. Keep her safe.

In her sleep she pushed against him....warm for the first time since winter had come, in a bed for the first time since the world had ended. 

Both lost and in this new world there was no found.


	11. Chapter 11

"Girl, quit!"

It was like trying to dress a squid, and he was rapidly losing patience.

"You aint used to this yet? You aint figured out I'm bigger and I always win? Hold the fuck still! You're not even my kid! Least you could do is gimme a fuckin little bit of co operation!"

He got nothing for his trouble but a hoot of anger.

"Yeah, uh huh. Suck it up."

He glanced at her face, saw her gearing up to spit at him and without thinking flicked her lip.  
"Girl, don't you even think about it."

She'd gotten him in the eye the first time they'd done this, and he'd been pissed as hell...secretly amazed and pleased that she'd taken a stand, once again nodding to her set, not that he was about to let her know that...and she still usually managed to get him at least once every goddamn time they did this.

Looking at her now, her eyes wide with shock and utterly livid, he pressed her a little more.

"Beginning to see why they just left you to go around half naked and freezing. What you got against clothes anyway?"

It wasn't the clothes, he knew that. It was being handled. She hated it as much as he did and he could readily sympathize but he wasn't gonna let her crawl around shivering.

She was motionless now, eyes locked on his in that terrible effort and he raised an eyebrow.

"What, you got nothin to say?"

He got the clothes on her, loathe to admit to himself that he was a little nervous about this still, silent glare. He'd hurt her, he could see it...the little lip already reddened and puffed from the flick of his nail, and he reached out now and touched it, sighing.

"I'm sorry about that. When I was little and acted up, my mom used to flick me. Guess it just came out."

There was no forgiveness in that glare, and she twisted her back to him, wriggled away, and he shook his head, feeling more than a little like an ass.  
Still. She'd been about to spit in his face.

"You know what they say, Daryl."

Jill, who couldn't bother herself to help him, handed him a smoke.

"No, what's that."

"We all become our mothers."

"Fuck that. You coulda helped."

"She's your gig, not mine."

And there it was, in a nutshell.

Bella had become his gig...every day begun now with the fight to get clothes on her so she didn't wind up icy and shivering halfway through the day, every night ending with the fight to get her to go to bed, always ending with him scooping her up and zipping her into the sleeping bag he'd found for her and walking away with a gruff "Girl, stay put and go the fuck to sleep."

He tried not to question why he was doing it.

If it didn't give him peace of mind...he still wasn't sure what his ultimate actions would be...it at least gave him something to do, which went a long way toward holding his murderous demons at bay.

At least until they pissed him off, sending him stalking out of range until he'd cooled off, the depth of his rage gauged by Bella, who's commentary on his slamming tantrums ranged from derisive hoots to an ominous silence and skittish retreat.

When she did that, he stayed gone for a while.

Not too long...too long and she'd be sleeping on the floor, skittering around soaked in spit and piss, dirty and cold and uncared for and he wasn't having it.  
If they were gonna keep her alive, they could damn well expend the energy to keep her at least as comfortable as they were.

In his opinion she deserved better, since she seemed the only one with any sense.

He'd almost punched Devin the morning after the night he'd almost killed them....they night he'd pulled her freezing, shivering little form into bed with him...as much for his own sake as hers, he knew.

He'd been asleep...deeply, blessedly, FINALLY....and the kid had woken him up with a lame ass "Little young for you, isn't she?"

He'd been furious....more than that, offended....not because Devin actually thought there was anything going on. It was clear he didn't. 

But it was his daughter. His child. Not a joke...and it pissed him off, pulled him up out of both sleep and bed and into the younger mans face in a blink.

He hadn't hit him....unsure he could stop he hadn't wanted to start, and concern for Bella broke in and outweighed his piss off before it could really get off the ground.

She hadn't moved when he'd jumped up, hadn't stirred while the men fussed at each other, and it was the unlikely expression of sudden worry...fear, even..on Devins face that caught his attention.

"What..."

"Is she ok?"

He'd hung there in the doorway, peering around Daryl like a child, tension in his face, in his voice.

"She hasn't moved Daryl, is she ok?!"

Daryl had caught his fear, turned toward the little girl in his bed, stepping aside to let her father through...growling in utter exasperation as he felt the mans hands on his back, shoving him a little.

Go see.

Was that some bullshit? He couldn't check on his own daughter? How did this guy wipe his own ass?

Shaking his head, he'd stepped back to his bed, sat down...a little rill of fear running up his back when she didn't so much as twitch....and pulled back the sleeping bag, fear disippating in an instant. 

She wasn't moving, no...but she was breathing, slow and even and deep, cheeks flushed pink, thumb securely corked in her mouth, limp as a dishrag and looking utterly ordinary...pretty even, he thought, with her eyes closed and those long little girl lashes lying sooty on her cheeks. 

He heard Devin come up behind him, glancing over his shoulder as he covered her back up, catching the look of sad affection on the mans face.

"She's fine, Devin. She's OUT. C'mon..."

"But she..."

"Come ON."

He'd ushered him out of the room, already knowing what the guy was about to say, cutting him off when he started.

"I know, she don't sleep. Right?"

He hadn't let him get a word in, had seen the meltdown coming and stopped it in its tracks.

"She don't sleep, and she don't suck her thumb and you aint never looked at her before and seen her just look like a little kid, and don't even bother to get all teared up."

He'd been pacing, once again holding back the urge to punch the kid in the face.

"She's sleeping because she's not freezing! She was in there last night cold as a goddamn ice cube and shivering her ASS off! She conked off ten minutes after I put her in there, soon's she thawed out. Boy...does she even got a bed?"

"No. She won't stay in one and once she gets down, even from just a futon like you have, she can't get back up into it so we just..."

He'd stopped, suddenly guilty.

"What."

Daryl, eyeing the shame on the mans face, knew it was gonna piss him off.

"You just WHAT, Devin."

"Put some blankets down here and there."

"Like she was a dog, right?"

"Daryl..."

"She even got clothes? All she's ever in is that ripped up t shirt."

"No. I grabbed her from the school and took off. All she had was what she was wearing, but what difference does it make?! Who sees her but us?!"

"Don't matter who sees her! She's cold!"

"She doesn't GET cold."

"Yes she fuckin well does!"

He'd been too mad to stick around, stomping back into his room to put his boots on and gear up, through the door and out into the world before things could escalate....before he hit the kid.

The cold and the space had cleared out some of the mad, and he'd found himself thinking about it logistically.

He could see the problem, could even....maybe...understand their logic, but it reeked of laziness and apathy, the way everything to do with her did. 

And fear.

It was all over the kids face, every time he looked at her, and Daryl guessed he could understand it...trying to keep a kid like that alive after the world ended was a scary goddamn proposition.

Still, if you were gonna do it, do it right. 

Nodding to himself he'd hit the road, no aimless ramble this time, no. This time goal specific.

It'd been nightfall before he'd returned, loaded down, cold, tired, goddamn feet bleeding through his socks again and what the fuck.

He'd dumped the majority of his load right on the floor in front of the fire and sat down, pulling off his boots, peeling off his socks, nodding his thanks as Jill handed him a hot towel to wipe the blood off, gesturing toward the pile in the middle of the room.

"There's three sleeping bags and as many little kid clothes as I could find. The world didn't fuckin consider winter when it ended in the summer. Had to break into about a million houses to find warm shit but it's there. Stack up them sleeping bags, put 'em somewhere by the fire and fuckin zip her ass into one of 'em when you go to bed. She'll stay unless she can work a zipper. And put some fuckin clothes on her."

He'd stomped off toward his room, calling over his shoulder as he went.

"There's a bunch of supplies in there too. Put 'em up."

He'd fallen into his bed, free now of Bella, agitated and worn out and thinking no way would he sleep, but he had, and when he'd come up again he'd found everything exactly as he'd left it...Tucker sitting by the fire with a book and a beer he'd scavenged from somewhere.

"Where'd they fuckin go, Tucker?"

"Out. Devin has himself a bona fide little breakdown so Jilly took him out to expend some...agitation."

"Uh huh. Couldn't nobody bother with any of this stuff?"

He'd started sorting through it, separating out the things they could all use.

"Well, you know how I feel about the kid. Lost cause. You'll forgive me if I don't bother to expend the energy to play house for someone essentially brain dead."

"That's great, Tucker. You're such an asshole."

"Look, Daryl....you want to take care of her, do it. Devin isn't going to. He's too eaten up by guilt that she even exists. He keeps her alive because he thinks he has to but you ask him...the greatest relief of his life would be her death."

"Don't think so, Tucker."

"Oh no? Why's that?"

"I think he thought she was dead when she was asleep in my room. He was fuckin terrified."

"Well...she's his daughter. I'd imagine it'd be a little mixed. Either way, he's not gonna take any better care of her than he is and it's not gonna matter what you bring back."

"Not Jill, either."

"Nope. It'll be you or nobody."

And so it'd been him, was him, and while it gave him something to occupy his mind and deflect some of the homicidal insanity that still fizzed and buzzed through him, the impracticality of it ate at him.

This world was about survival. 

And no matter what he did...she wouldn't survive.


	12. Chapter 12

Daryl being Daryl, his role of protector toward the weakest in the group had been totally organic..had simply flowed out of need...and he'd had no idea it was strategeous. 

Awareness of group dynamic wasn't something he had any experience with, and he was puzzled, at first, when Devin and Jill began to defer to him...and Tucker began to avoid him like plague.

For the first time since they'd taken him in, he got the feeling they were listening to him...and out of something akin to respect and not the vaguely fearful air they'd had so far. That they weren't so skittish...weren't so ready to disbelieve the things he tried to teach them out of uneasy suspicion...went a long way toward bringing his hackles down and as time passed he no longer felt like a pitbull they'd pulled in from the street and were still afraid might bite.

As the tone changed, he felt that murderous agitation begin to settle...the feeling that these people were a direct threat to his survival waning as they took his words seriously and stopped running outside every time someone came into their clearing, as they took his advice and wrote down the things he told them, no longer relying on memory to determine what was safe to eat, what wasn't...and he'd finally disabused them of the notion that just because they saw birds eating it didn't mean it was safe for people.

They'd essentially told him he was full of shit the first time he'd told them that, when he'd smacked a handful of lethal berries out of Jills hand with a growl and a reminder that he'd told her to leave those be.  
She'd told him about the birds and he'd told HER about the birds and damned if that girl hadn't told him he was stupid.

That attitude was disippating now, draining away, slowly but as surely as the tide. They didn't always defer to his wishes...but their arguments now were logic based and reasonable, their objections clear and lucid and he'd conceded to them several times..something else that went a ways toward sealing his place in their group..and them in his mind. 

This kind of sane give and take wasn't something he was familiar with, and he was finding he not only could live with it, but liked it.

 

He'd begun to notice that what they lacked in natural survival skills they more than made up for in ability to FIND things...and get them....quickly and safely. 

He'd convinced them to limit time outside, and together they'd settled on a schedule of hunting, foraging and scavenging that brought them everything they needed with minimal risk and it began to seem to him that this really COULD work....that together they might actually survive.

As the winter wore on and his feet healed, as Bella tamed and became more child and less feral little THING, as he saw the return of the resourcefullness he'd initially credited them with, he began to think of them as his people. His to provide for. His to protect. 

More than that, his to rely on..something he wasn't in any way used to doing with anyone. He never had, not really....if anything he'd had to be self sufficient almost from day one and the idea that anyone actually THOUGHT about him was alien. 

Of course it meant his stress level went up....as their immediate area became cleared out the two of them ventured further and further afield, and now their runs sometimes took a couple of days.

That they were good at finding shelter, good at hiding, good at what they did mediated his worry somewhat..but as distribution of the load...they let him, for the most part, handle the hunting and foraging...didn't take him away for days at a time...one man certainly wasn't going to hunt out an area this large...he was usually the one there waiting and it frazzled his nerves. 

Never mind that he fussed at them when they mentioned being worried if HE was gone too long. He knew he was fine. Had no idea if they were.

Still, they seemed to always get back and always have something that made the worry worth it...like the time they'd been four days out there and he'd been frantic, sure they'd been either killed or trapped....and had it not been for Bella he'd have already gone looking for them. 

He'd just begun to seriously consider seeing if she'd fit in a pack when they showed up...so loaded down they could barely stand, and he'd railed at them for the better part of an hour about trying to carry so much.....until he'd seen what they had.

Four towns over they'd come across a medical complex and had managed to drag home a plethora of medical supplies and the books to show them how to make use of them. Intravenous equipment and bag after bag after bag of saline, glucose,medications, vitamins.  
Two sleeping bags filled with Ensure for Bella and a whole case of Gtubes.  
(True, she'd never pulled one out, but they did get funky from time to time and need to be changed out, and while they both were more than ready to teach him how to do it, it was the one thing he refused.  
He wasnt messing around in that little girls insides.)

Whole cases of oral medications. Antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, allergy medications, painkillers, sleeping aids, anti anxiety, anti psychotic, anti seizure...they'd taken all that they could carry.

First aid supplies of every kind, slings, crutches, splints....and finally a huge bag filled with small plastic boxes....he later counted 83... that they'd dumped out onto the table for him with grins almost wider than their faces could hold.

He'd found each little box held a pair of prescription eyeglasses and as they'd hoped he would, he found half a dozen that cleared up the world for him. 

That they'd dragged them all back struck him as crazy, but when he'd mentioned it they waved him off.

They'd store them and if, in the future, anyone needed them they'd be there. If he needed different ones, they'd be there. Glasses, after all, didn't expire. And they didn't weigh much.

The goddamn glasses had almost undone him, and it hadn't helped any when Jill had reminded him about the coffee he'd brought back...or the pounds and pounds of it they'd brought back after he'd told them how to find the old roasters plant.

It didn't help much at all, and he'd gone to sleep that night on the edge of tears...not sure why, unable to figure out if it was because he was touched they'd thought of him, or guilty because he didn't think they should have. 

That what he was experiencing was family didn't much occurr to him. He didn't know enough about it for any kind of frame of normal reference. It was just, finally, a good situation. A good place to be, and people who were quickly becoming valuable and integral aspects of his world.

Tucker...the only wild card...made himself scarce, though Daryl figured it was more out of an intense need to not have to do anything but smoke his copious amounts of weed than anything else. He had a nice little crop growing out there in the woods, and the only time he really ever ventured out was to reap a little harvest every so often....trips that never bothered Daryl.

When it came to avoiding notice, Tucker was an expert and he was the one Daryl never worried about being caught above.

That he didn't lift a damn finger was a lot more worrisome, but it was what it was and he was too relieved that he didn't any longer want to kill anyone to risk stirring it up.

He still thought Tucker was dangerous...still kept a wary eye on him, and because he in no way wanted to risk Tucker finding his hiding places...that he still felt he needed them didn't ring the alarm bells it should have, and how often he'd think of that later...how often that would dig at him, gouge at him, bleed him.....he didn't tell Devin or Jill about them, either. He couldn't very well tell them to keep it from Tucker..not without setting up an "Us and Him" vibe he was fairly desperate to avoid, and he kept his suspicions about Tucker to himself.

That he'd done that would drive him and everything he did....every decision he made...for the rest of his life...but of course he had no way of knowing that.

In the end, he guessed he got too comfortable...a mistake he wouldn't make again...and when the bizarre blackouts started he never looked for an outside source, never suspected there was anything in play...and was never sure, to the end of his life, just exactly who had been playing those cards.

There were too many long nights that he suspected it might have been him.


	13. Chapter 13

It began with a cold. 

How intensely stupid, that everything could so effectively come apart because of a cold.

He noticed Jill coughing, sniffling, downing cold medicine like candy, watched it jump to Devin and then finally to Bella...who still managed to spit in his eye every chance she got whenever he did anything she disagreed with...and so he wasn't the least bit surprised when his head began to ache, his sinuses to burn, his chest to clog.

Irritated, yes. But not surprised.

It was laying him out, now, though, no doubt about it. His throat felt cracked and raw, his lungs like two slabs of raw meat, stripped and hung to dry, and when, overcome with dizziness, he'd nearly dropped Bella,he took himself, shivering and sweating, to Jill...humiliated as hell but feeling too shitty to let it stop him, dropping into a chair by the fire as if it were his last move...ever.

"Jill.."

One word, and that too much, the cough tore through him, simultaneously wet and slimey, cracked and parched, and she was at his side in an instant, the memory of the pneumonia that had almost killed him right in the front of her mind.

"Oh fuck, Daryl...how long's this been going on?!"

"Not that long, damp down."

But he was wheezing his ass off, wasn't he. Yes he was.

"Just gettin bad. I almost dropped the kid. What we got that'll kick this? Will you get OFF me?"

This as her hand came up, brushing sweaty hair from his eyes, coming to rest on his forehead, on his face.

"You're running a hell of a temp, Daryl. Jesus. Hang on, lemme get he list."

"What list?"

"I compiled a list of all the meds we have, and what they're good for. Without being able to test it's kind of a crap shoot but it's better than nothing and you drop that right now, you hear me?"

This as she saw his hand come out of his pocket with a cigarette, the look of horror on her face striking him as utterly comical, setting off a laugh that ran into a coughing fit....and damn if it didn't make her point for her.

Disgusted, he set the smoke on the table and sat back, arms crossed over his middle more in pain than defiance, sliding over for her as she sat beside him, notebook in hand.

"See? All these...."

He pushed it away, one hand coming up to cover his eyes, shaking his head.

"I can't focus for shit, the whole goddamn room is spinning. Just pick somethin out. You got the stuff all arranged in the storeroom? Like...you can find it?"

"I do! When you feel better go take a look. Even you're blind ass could find what you were looking for in there. What all you got going on besides the fever and the cough? I can already see how bad your chest hurts."

"Throat hurts pretty bad, and I got a headache. And I'm dizzy as fuck."

"You feel pukey?"

"Nah. Not really."

"Pain anywhere else?"

"Nah, girl, I just TOLD you what all."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm just checking. I'll be right back. And listen...you're not gonna like this."

"Not surprised. What."

"You should move back out here with us while you're sick. You've got pneumonia again, you know that, right?"

"Figured probably."

"I mean..I'm gonna get the thermometer but that fevers way too high to just be a chest cold. And the pain..."

"Yeah, I'm not arguing."

"You're really not. That worries me more than the cough."

She eyed him critically for a moment, finally reaching out to squeeze his hand, waving off his little grunt of annoyance.

"Sit tight, I'll be back in a minute."

True to her word it hadn't been much longer than that, and she'd come back loaded down with juice bottles and drugs, plonking them down in front of him and slapping his hand away when he reached to help himself.

"Just a damn minute, you don't even know what's here."

"I can read."

"Uh huh but there's no instructions, these are supply bottles. Will you just fucking hold on a minute and let me figure out how much how often? Can you do that?"

"You gotta be so mean about it?"

"You gotta be so impatient about it? Geez..."

He sat back again, biting back the urge to laugh at her, not out of any sensitivity but because he didn't want to set off the cough again, witholding comment when she flagged down Devin.

"Dev, go pull Daryls bed out here, huh? I don't want him sleeping alone."

Devin, nodding his agreement, eyed Daryl with every indication of sympathy.

"I knew she'd make you move when I heard you hackin away in there last night. If she hadn't dosed herself senseless on nyquil she'd have dragged you out here at midnight."

"Thank God for small favors. I'm caught now, though."

"You know she's right."

"I know."

"Here, Daryl...DEVIN! Will you DO it?"

"Jesus, yes boss. Fuuuck...."

He shook his head, aiming a kick at Daryls foot as he barked out a laugh, nodding when it became a coughing fit.

"See? Laugh at someone elses misfortune and see where it gets you."

Jill, impatient with them both, waved him off, popping tabs out of a blister pack and transferring them to a bottle. 

"Look, this is Zithromax. According to this, you want to get three of them into you today..that's a loading dose... and then one a day for five days. This one is tramadol, it'll help that chest pain. One every six hours. I don't know why I'm telling you since I'm gonna make sure you're takin 'em right and shut up. Also...all this juice? Get it down you TODAY."

"Girl you're crazy, I'll fuckin drown."

"No you wont. Open up now, I want to see how high that fever is."

He put a lid on any complaints when she tipped it into his view a minute later and he saw the readout. 103.1.

"Fuck."

"Right. Dev, put that over by me. Daryl? Go to bed."

He did...and the world slowly began to come apart.

At first, he'd thought it was the fever that was making things trippy....making things strange. 

He couldn't seem to stay awake, for one thing. He'd make it to alert only to crash, suddenly and unexplainably....uncontrollably as well and that bothered him. That he could just pass out at any given moment left him too vulnerable...and too useless.

Time seemed to be jumping around..more accurately it seemed to be missing, and he'd suddenly find himself displaced..confused and disoriented.

Small things at first....lying in bed reading he'd suddenly, in a blink, find himself several chapters ahead of where he last remembered being...with no idea what he'd read.

Watching Devin fletch arrows, he'd blink and find everyone asleep, hours having passed but missing from his mind as if they'd never been.

He ate meals he had no memory of.

Restrung his bow. Moved shit around. Changed his clothes....none of it anywhere in his consciousness.

Took care of Bella....and oh the weird little thrill of fear that had shot through him the day he'd noticed her bathed and pajamad and zipped into her sleeping bag and asked who'd done it, only to be told "Um....you did, Daryl."

He'd finally mentioned it to Jill....questioning the drugs, which didn't seem to be helping him at all...his fever was unrelenting and shaking chills had been added to the mix, his lungs worsening steadily.

She'd been confused and worried...agreeing that it must be the medications that were causing these weird little fugue states, completely baffled as to why they didn't seem to be doing anything else.

She'd dug back into the books, this time with him, and they'd chosen another course that, at first, had seemed to be working and they'd relaxed, feeling themselves on the right track to get him back on his feet...and then he'd relapsed again, the drugs as good as useless.

Baffled, hearing how thick his chest was, she set him up a steam tent, settling him under a towel and over a simmering pot of water and mint, instructing him to just stay there and breathe.

He'd done it, feeling no relief to speak of....

And then he'd been outside.

Outside, fully dressed, geared up, a decent brace of small game already affixed to his belt.

Hunting?

How was he hunting? How had he come to be here in the first place? And where, for that matter, was here?

He had no idea...it just wasn't there, but he couldn't breathe, that he was sure of...the burn in his chest a living thing.

He had to get back, and although backtracking his own trail was easy enough, what he was seeing was scarier than anything he'd seen yet to date.

His trail was a havoc strewn, blundering, lumbering mess of anhilated bushes and scrub...he must have sounded like an elephant crashing through there, and when had he EVER done that? 

He found several streams and puddles of urine...right on the game trail and he knew better than that, he'd never piss on a game trail...and never piss where he was walking, what the fuck was that? There was puke, too, and he'd already known he'd find that, eventually, he could taste it in his throat...but again, right on the path? And this staggering, looping backtrail...

Had he been ASLEEP?

Was that what had been going on? Was he sleepwalking? 

It couldn't be. Sure, he could buy that the fever, or the meds, might make him get up and wander....but get up, get dressed, go outside, HUNT???? catch and clip actual game? Not possible.

And surely someone would have stopped him, had he been wandering around asleep on his feet.

Fear had become terror by the time he got back, and the chaos he walked into did nothing to aleviate it in the slightest.

He walked into yelling...swearing...and a smell so acrid and burning he knew immediately it was dangerous.

He never got a word out...his first step into the room brought a hoot of alarm from the floor and all conversation stopped, Jill swooping down on him less a human being and more a force of nature.

"Daryl, Jesus christ, thank god! What were you thinking?! Come on, get..."

He shook her off, inclining his head at the pot on the fire, the source of the acrid, toxic smell.

"Whatever that is don't touch it."

The words tore at his throat, set him coughing, but he waved away her help, stumbling toward the fire and grabbing the pot bare handed, barely feeling the burn as he tipped the liquid down the floor drain.

"What the fuck do you have in this?"

"We don't know, and we weren't gonna touch it."

Devin, at his side and taking his arm and thank god because he was pretty close to just keeling over, led him to the table, gently removing the pot from his hands.

"We were keeping it so maybe you could look and tell us what was in it."

"Well who put it there?"

He was getting his breath back, now that he was sitting, and he dumped the sludge out of the pot and onto the talbe, poking at it even as the other two began to divest him of dead animals and outerwear.

"Not us. It happened while you were gone, so...not you. Had to be Tucker. Where did you GO? And why? Daryl what the fuck is going on?"

"I didn't know I went anywhere. And I don't know."

He pushed the sludge into several piles, shivering now with more than chills.

"This shit's lethal. Fucking LETHAL. If you'd even sipped at it you'd be dead. How'd you know?"

"The smell. And...those are castor beans, right? You told us they were deadly."

"Kill you in minutes. These here? Rosary Peas. Nothing you ever want to put in your mouth and I don't think you should even touch them. People do. They make beads out of them. They die doing it, too. The rest of this? I got no clue. Never seen it before. Jesus fuck I'm so fucking cold. Throw this shit out and throw that pot out, too. If any of that sank into the iron you'll never be safe using it. I gotta lie down....."

He stripped off the rest of his outerwear, shaking hard enough now that his teeth rattled, sudden helpless tears filling his eyes and spilling over....unexpected, unanticipated, involuntary....and he was too scared to care.

"I don't know what happened, you guys. I don't know. I was sitting under the steam and then I was outside. I had all that game....but the suns just coming up, was I out there hunting at NIGHT? What the fuck..."

"Yeah. Here..."

Devin, eyeing Jill unreadably, sat down next to him, one hand resting on his arm...comfort or restraint and at this point it didn't matter, handing him his antibiotic and a juice box.

"Take this. Whats the last thing you remember?"

"I just told you, sitting under the steam."

"Ok..well you got up and went to bed, passed right out....got up in the middle of the night and got dressed. Jill asked you what you were doing, you said you had to go out. We tried to stop you and at first you just brushed us off but...when you got to the door and I blocked it you pulled your gun."

"No I did not! I..."

"Yes you did. Told me to get the fuck outta your way or you'd end me. You called me someone elses name."

"What name."

"Toby Jo."

"Awwww fuck."

"What..."

"Jill......is this shit I'm taking making me sleepwalk? Is that what this is? Because if I thought you were him I was dreaming. He was my brothers dealer...evil fucker....Jesus. Look, you guys....maybe you should lock me back up. Until this clears up, fuck....I don't want to hurt anybody..."

"Lock you up where, down in the cells? You'd freeze to death!"

"Then...then...cuff me or something. Anything. ANYTHING!"

He was crying hard, now....shaking hard enough to hurt....too afraid for them to get a grip.

"Look, what if it wasn't Tucker who put that stuff in there? What if it was me? I keep doing stuff I have no idea I'm doing!"

"Daryl."

She pushed Devin aside, sat beside him, one hand gripping his. 

"Listen to me. Even if the drugs are making you sleepwalk, everything you've done in your sleep you've done right. You didn't do this..this is all wrong."

"It's not wrong if I was trying to kill you!"

And there, it was out...and he couldn't look at her, shocked to his core when she laughed and squeezed his hand.

"Daryl...we all knew that was on your mind. And it's pretty clear that it isn't anymore. I really don't think this was you."

"You did not know."

"Yes we did."

"Then..."

"Why didn't we just lock you up or take you out? Because we were pretty sure that if you were gonna do it, you'd have done it. When you took yourself away we knew it was to keep us safe...as much as you want to think we're idiots, Daryl...we're not...and nobody who really wants to kill you is going to struggle so hard not to think that way. And you weren't fighting not to do it, you were fighting not to think it. Daryl....like it or not, you're a GOOD man and it's crystal clear! You weren't ever going to hurt us."

"I set you up to fail."

"Yes, you did. And we knew it. Didn't you think it was a little strange that we brought all that stuff to you but it didn't cause us ANY problems? We'd already fixed what you tried to break before we ever told you we'd noticed it."

"Deliberate sabotage and you let me get away with it?! Maybe you ARE that stupid."

"Was it deliberate? You were honestly confused, Daryl. We could see it. We could see YOU. And trust me, we talked about locking you up. Making you leave. Drugging you.."

"Killing me first?"

"No. Daryl...you weren't going to hurt us. The only one who didn't know that was you."

"I almost did do it."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes I did! Bella stopped me."

"Bella stopped you. How?"

"She got between us."

"And she's so huge and formidable you could't have stepped right over her?"

"She...snapped me out of it."

"One little girl who can't speak? I know which night you're talking about, y'know. The night you took her into bed with you. We saw you losing it, all that day. We were never worried about ourselves, we were worried you'd hurt yourself."

"I thought about that too."

"I know you did. And believe me, we weren't as busy as we sounded. I had a sight line right into your room, and I was wide awake when you came out and went to the latrine. I was right outside that door almost the whole time you were in there. We wouldn't have let you hurt yourself...or us. But you didn't DO any of it and you didn't do this, either. No....this...I'm pretty sure was Tucker. I think..."

She stopped, something dawning in her eyes, and they went flinty flat, shrewd...

"Dev, stay with him, I'll be back in a second."

He would never know where she went, or what she did...he never saw her come back.  
He glanced up at Devin as she left, shaky and as freaked out as he could ever remember being just thinking about the fact that these people had known, all along, how dangerous he might be, and had let him stay anyway, started to speak and felt it wash over him...something more than mere sleepiness....familiar now in its frequency...closer to being anesthetized...fell into a sleep so profound it was closer to death....

And blinked awake into stone darkness, the hard floor of his tunnel room under his back....head splitting and filled with an unearthly, keening wail...and the roar of his name, inhuman and insane, echoing down black halls.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back down to the glorious number one  
> My prints all over the smoking gun  
> Back down to the glorious number one  
> All lines to the living are now undone.....

It was Tucker, yelling his name, he could tell that much, though not much else through the pain slicing him in half.

His guts were on fire....tangled....twisted...the pain was breathtaking...exquisite....and he knew, in that moment, that he was as close to death as he'd ever been....that these moments were very likely his last.

He could feel his insides pouring out, liquified...and Merles voice floated through his consciousness, laughing uproariously at him pissing out his asshole....but there was nothing funny about it and Merle could just fuck off and die.

Now THAT was funny, because he was already dead and soon Daryl would be too...and Merle would have a fielday with it, baby brother dying shitting out his intestines because that was goddamn well what had to be happening. Nothing else could hurt so much.

He'd done it, he had. He knew he had. He'd passed out and in some insensible state he'd poisoned them....himself included....he'd known after just a couple of swallows...but how had he known? He hadn't tasted it. He'd known because he'd done it....

And he hadn't BEEN in that state, had he. No. This was different. He knew how he'd come to be here....he remembered.

It was strange, and vague...remembered the way he sometimes remembered dreams....but it was there. He'd come here....vomiting as he ran and there was blood, he'd seen it....felt it running down his legs as well....hoping against hope that getting it up and out would save him, knowing it probably wouldn't.....come here and locked the doors behind him so that when he died...when he turned....he couldn't get at them.

But then, they were dying too, or dead already, and fuck, what a failure he was. 

Failure...or killer.

But he hadn't done it. He hadn't. If he had it would be him out there, yelling...hunting someone.   
No, it had been Tucker. And Tucker was looking for him.

Oh really?

The voice in his head was suddenly audible, as clear and separate from him as Tuckers.

Is he looking for you to kill you? To finish what he started? Or because you killed his friends? Which is it, Dixon, hmm? Do you know? And where's that little girl by the way?

Oh God. 

Bella. 

Where was she? That was her...that sound. That wail. He'd heard her do it before....when had he heard it? Couldn't remember. Didn't matter. He'd heard it.

It was her and she was alive and she didn't EAT so....where was she? And oh god, if the others died and got at her....

"I know you're in here, Daryl! I saw which way you ran, there's no way out that way and you know by now you can't get out without me knowing! I don't know where you're hiding but I'll find you and you'll pay! Do you hear me? You'll pay!"

Tuckers voice was close....near the door...and christ HE was near the door....just a couple of rooms in....probably as far as he'd been able to run before he collapsed....but what the fuck had happened?

It was all so....bleary.

He'd passed out, he knew that....and then Jills voice had awakened him, pushing a cup on him, telling him to drink.

Soup. She'd made soup. It'd tasted fine, he hadn't noticed anything and then....then he'd realized...

WHY had he realized?

Because he'd done it. He'd done it, he'd done it, he'd....no. Tucker was how he'd realized. Tucker wasn't eating....and not only was he not eating he was eyeing them so hard....and he was jittering...sweating....picking at his nails...fidgeting.....

Tucker didn't fidget. Tucker was a stoner sloth who barely moved.

But he was nervous....frightened....and as he'd watched him his senses had come on alert and suddenly he'd tasted it....faint and barely there, covered up in the gamy wildness of the meat...he'd spit it out, yelled to the rest to stop, stop eating....stop eating and throw it up...throw it up right now, right now, right....

He'd jammed his fingers down his throat, feeling the ache beneath his breastbone already and knowing it was too late....seen the blood come up with the soup, seen the same from them, and they'd all turned to Tucker, sitting with his own bowl in front of him untouched...and he'd thrown it at Daryl, screaming at him....

"What did you do?! What'd you fucking DO?!" 

What HAD he done?

Tucker had run and he'd let him....had watched the others until they had nothing left to bring up, pushing water at them, telling them to drink, drink as much as they could and then make it come up...there was nothing else he knew to do, he didn't know what it was, but if it was anything like what had been in that pot earlier in the day they none of them stood a chance.

He'd seen the understanding in their eyes as they drank the water he gave them, seen them check their guns....and the rage had just filled him...boiled over...consumed him and he'd gone after Tucker, gone after him and he'd kill him, yes he would...he'd kill this man who had killed his...

They weren't his family.

And he might have been the one who killed them.

"It was damn good, Daryl. Damn good!"

Tucker, calling into the air, and Daryl could hear he was facing away from him....good. He really didn't know this place was here.

"You really had them convinced I was setting you up!"

Was that what had happened? Was that it? Had Tucker been setting him up? 

"Hell, you almost had ME convinced! Know what the giveaway was?"

He didn't, and he almost answered...almost called out...biting it back at the very last second.

"It was Bella, you fucking fool! Bella! That's how they all knew, too! They were on to you, at the end...oh yes, they're all dead now! Except for her! That was the giveaway right there! If it was me I'd have started with the little freak! But you...you have that SOFT SPOT for her...."

The words dripped disgust and Daryl felt his rage flare up again. How did he DARE....

"You couldn't do it, could you Dixon! Couldn't hurt the precious little retard! She's still alive, I can hear her yelling! I can't fucking FIND HER, where the fuck IS SHE YOU ASS!!! WHERE IS SHE!!!!"

Insane. Completely insane. Stalking around the building yelling into the air, and fuck where WAS she? That sound was too close...too close...too....

He gasped, suddenly, awareness flooding him as he remembered.

She was here. She was with him. But...she wasn't with him. Not in this room and he was LOCKED IN THIS ROOM, at least as far as going back. The door was shut shut.

He'd...what....what....what had he done!

He'd run for Tucker, felt the first cramps take him and double him over....felt his insides turn molten and liquid...and he'd known he wouldn't get Tucker. 

He'd heard her.....seen her......that horrible screeching wail coming from her and his first thought was that Tucker had poisoned her too, but no....he'd seen her tears.....hadn't Devin said she'd NEVER cried?

She knew what was happening, knew they were dying, and he'd run by her and seen her spin, seen her start to follow him...

Follow him.

He couldn't have done it or she wouldn't have been trying to come with him.

He'd picked her up, not even thinking.....and put her...where?

Somewhere he couldn't get at her.

But she couldn't get out, either, which meant if he didn't get back to her she'd die.

"She'll die anyway with nobody to take care of her. She'll starve."

But maybe he wasn't dying. He was hurting for damn sure, and it was bad.....but....it wasn't getting any worse.

Was whatever it was failing?

Had he not ingested enough? Was it something like bittersweet? Now that he thought about it, there had been a faint, sickish sweetness in the back of his throat. That'd clean you out good on both ends, and it could make you bleed....could irritate the living shit outta your mouth and throat and innards....but it took a lot to kill you.

If it'd been something like that....he'd survive. Hell..they all would.  
But Tucker had said they were dead.

"Because he already killed them."

Or they'd eaten more....had kept it down longer....how much had they had before they'd woken him up to get him to sip from that cup? What else had they eaten that might have been tainted?

"DAAARRRYYYYLLLLL!!!!!"

Ah, he was just roaring around out there now, and this was a goddamn situation.

One of them had poisoned the food. Evidence pointed to Tucker. He was obviously not sick, and he hadn't been eating...he'd been so nervous it had tipped Daryl off. 

He'd set him up.

In fact....

His memory fed him a little more....even more vague, more dreamlike, but real enough for all that.

Jill, shaking him awake, some time before the soup....shaking him hard, telling him to wake up...telling him he'd been taking...something.

Random phrases floated through his head..."every six hours...." "Christ, no....can't...awake." "People....this shit.....CARS in their.....never remember...wake him UP!!"

Drugged. Drugged..and he remembered now...sipping that vile, tainted soup while Jill told him his painkillers had been replaced....his antibiotics.

With what? Didn't know, wasn't there.

His guts cramped again and he cried out this time, the pain dirty and insulting...felt a wave of nausea and a rush of hot liquid in his mouth...vile but with none of the coppery tang of blood and he spit it out, wishing he could see....

DIdn't need to.

He didn't think he was dying.

And if he wasn't, the others might not be. 

Might.  
Not be.

He hauled himself up, felt around, hoping like hell he'd brought his gun, his bow...anything...but no...nothing. 

Didn't matter.

He wasn't about to die in here like a rat in a trap and he wasn't about to let Bella.

He stood up, tried a step, slipped in what he was sure was a puddle of his own bodily waste and grimaced, gagged....spat....and took another step. It hurt...fuck did it hurt....but he'd make it.

God, he was so close to the interior. He had so far to go to get out and around and back to the front, but it was the only option. He'd shut the door tight and it didn't open from this direction.

Steeling himself, he stumbled across the room, pushed the door open, stepped through, shut it behind him. One room at a time...doubled over sometimes for what in reality were hours but what difference did it make?...hearing both Tuckers ranting and Bellas wails growing steadily fainter, until at last he pushed open a final door and felt sunlight hit him full in the face.

He hid, just beyond the entrance, struggling to catch his breath, shivering and shocky, the combination of fever, blood loss, dehydration and cold catching up to him with smiting speed...but he'd seen what he needed to. Seen why Tucker had said he couldn't leave without him knowing.

They were dead alright, his friends. And he didn't doubt it was poison that had killed them...the bloody froth that had boiled from their mouths and noses....that was puddled up around their feet after it'd run down their legs...was mute testimony to that, and he knew all he had to thank for the fact that he was still drawing breath was that he'd barely tasted dinner before Tuckers nerves had given him away.

Or his own.

Whichever...they were dead, there was no doubt, and someone....Tucker, who else...at least he knew THAT hadn't been him, for once he remembered his whereabouts...had arranged them in the entrance and then shot each of them cleanly through the head, flooding the area with enough blood that anyone who tried to walk through would be wading in it...and leaving unavoidable tracks.

Smart, really. 

As far as Tucker was concerned...Elvis hadn't left the building.

Well...he was sure as fuck coming in, and Tucker might have been smart, but he wasn't THAT smart. He hadn't taken their guns. 

That was fine, Daryl had, and he'd checked them. Loaded and ready to fire and his. Now. Ready.

WHY hadn't Tucker taken their guns? 

Maybe he was that smart. Given that Tucker thought Daryl was still inside, he'd have to crouch down with his back to the door to get those weapons....and he had no doubt Tucker was watching. Clean shot, from behind, as cowardly as he was... But he wasn't watching ALL the time....his voice, travelling as it had, had convinced him of that. He was hunting him. 

And so he waited....freezing.....knowing full well he might die out here but whatever....because sooner or later Tucker was going to come and check. He was going to open that door and peek to see if there were tracks leading away....and when he did, well, he could welcome himself to the last thing he'd ever do.

It had been close. 

Too close.

By the time Tucker had appeared he'd been so cold he'd dropped the first gun and Tucker had fired....fired and caught the edge of his shoulder and goddamn did he really need to leak from anywhere else?

Sheer terror had fired him up enough to hold on to the second one and even shaking so hard he though he could hear his bones rattling he hadn't missed.

If he had he'd have just turned the last bullet on himself anyway, but he hadn't missed, had taken that bastard clean in the throat.

He'd spared the sound of another shot to make sure to blow his brains out, and then dared the no doubt incoming dead....five gunshots in as many hours? Someone had heard it and had put out the bee signal.They were coming...and his own failing body, expending energy and time he didn't have to drag the bodies a good distance away from the entrance, and cover the blood trail. 

The walkers would take care of muddling up the rest, he knew, and he imagined he could hear them as he slipped inside and locked the door....wondering all the while if he had just killed the villain or the hero.

Teeth chattering, the room dropping away under his feet, he knew it had maybe been literally too close...that he might be on his way out...but he wasn't about to give up. 

Oh, he wouldn't go get Bella, not until he was sure he was out of the woods. She was shut in a room and miserable as hell but she was safe....of course if he died so would she, but at least she'd be spared the indignity of being eaten.

He staggered...lurched might have been a better word...into the storeroom, found as many cans of broth as he could carry and hauled them back out to the fire....pitching every pot they had and opting to cook in the open cans....huddled as close to the fire as he could get, sipping hot liquid directly from the cans, turning away to heave it back up until he was almost ready to just give up and die...finally realizing that some of it might be staying down....and then that most of it was...that some of the pain in his gut had eased up, the shakes had begun to diminish...and he thought that maybe....just maybe....he might make it.

When he thought he could stand he went for the tunnels, weak enough that by the time he got there he was almost rethinking it....pulled open the door and propped it wide....stepped in and pulled open the second....she was in there, he knew. He heard her patented little spin as she turned to look at him.

He didn't look in, just propped the door and walked away, calling back over his shoulder to her.

"I'd wait a little if I was you, make sure I don't turn into something bad. You c'mom out when you want to."

He'd stumbled away then, hoping he hadn't just assigned her the worst possible death, and fell onto his bed....splattered as it was with bloody vomit, both his and the others and he just didn't care....didn't care.....

He stared into the fire, shivering still, until warmth and despair took him under and he slept...and this time he didn't wander.


	15. Chapter 15

He wasn't sure how long he slept....how many hours, days, weeks.....and he didn't care enough to wonder overlong...his ability to give much of a shit seemed to have seeped away while he slept, leaving a ragged, hollow emptiness.

All he knew was that he hurt.....from his soul to every fiber of his tortured body he hurt, and he supposed he'd have to do something about it.

Just getting off the bed, for starters...weak enough to make it a challenge, his goddamn shoulder was stuck to the mattress and yeah...he'd been out a while, hadn't he, for the bleeding to stop and scab over right to the cloth.

Perfect.

Well. There was only one thing for it, and he did it, wrenching himself up and over, biting into his lip to stop the sound as the wound tore open, panting in both pain and effort.  
"Awww fuck, that was a bitch."

So was that, his croak of a voice in this empty room...it was cold, too, the fire was out.

"Jesus, how long WAS I out?"

Sighing, he scrubbed at his face...felt several days worth of stubble there...eyed the disaster of the room....no blinding moment of it all coming back to him, no...it had never left, had been there while he slept, right there to greet him when his eyes finally blinked open.

Everything stuck on, dried on, and cold. The fireplace...cold. His body....FUCKING cold...and where was Bella? 

His glance around the room told him she was nowhere immediately obvious. 

Had she never come out?

He thought about shouting for her....then thought about how loud his voice would sound in this emptiness and changed his mind, opting instead to just speak.

"Girl, you here somewhere?"

He listened...heard nothing...no rustle, no hoot, no lip smacking on a thumb. Nothing.

"Fuck."

It was too fucking cold in here and if he didn't care for himself, he cared for her. If she were still alive...and he had no way of knowing if she was...assuming so only because nobody had snacked on him in his sleep..she wouldn't be for long if he didn't thaw it out in here.

Christ but it hurt to move.

Sighing again, cursing as he stood, he hauled himself toward the fire, forcing himself to pick up the remnants of that last meal from the floor as he went, throwing dishes and pots right into the firepit.  
Looking around, he could see why she wouldn't have come in...the floor was covered in broken glass, blood, puke, shit, tainted food, blankets that had been sopping and now were crusted over.  
He had to clean it up if only for her sake, so she could come in and get warm. 

In the end, it wasn't as hard as he'd thought, since he'd really only scooped everything up, thrown it in the blaze and hosed off the floor, watching everything run toward and down the drain...alarmed at how thin the water pressure seemed.

The place ran off a well and a solar pump....but it was goddamned cold and if the well had started to freeze they could be in trouble.

"Shit."

He left the water trickling into the drain to keep the pump moving, and trecked off to the storeroom for a new pot...hauling it back causing every muscle in his body to scream...filling it and setting it to boil and steam, then grinding coffee and filling the percolator, setting it on the fire with hands that shook so hard he was afraid he'd drop it in.

He didn't want any fucking coffee and a nasty little thrill ran through him when he realized he'd put it on for Jill...already habit...always the first one awake he always started the coffee....and he wondered how much longer he'd stay here...huffing out a little laugh at that.

"Dixon, what the fuck. You finally got the place all to yourself....well, you and Bella...and now you don't wanna stay? You afraid of ghosts or somethin?"

He stopped, gazing into the fire, and ran a hand over his eyes.

"Afraid of what I did."

He didn't think he'd done anything. Didn't FEEL like he'd done anything...but he didn't know and he thought that just might be his undoing.

Jill had been telling him something, though...he'd been too out of it to stay awake, but she'd tried to get him up, he remembered that now...tried to get him to walk...to sit at the table....

His eyes followed his thoughts to the work table and he saw it....pills and bottles and her list. Whatever she'd been trying to get through his head.

He limped over, eyeing the water for boiling, and reached to poke at her findings.  
His meds....and other meds...pills set out as if on display in front of each bottle, a little paper tab under each tablet.  
Zithromax.  
Tramadol  
Lindomycin  
Ambien  
Protandim

It didn't take him long to see what she'd been getting at.   
Both sets of antibiotics seemed to have switched..mid course...for whatever protandim was. It certainly looked enough like both tablets to pass, whatever it was.   
He picked one up and sniffed it, smelled turmeric and green tea and put it back down, baffled.  
Some kind of herbal supplement?  
It was the Ambien in place of the Tramadol that alarmed him. One, they looked nothing alike, and even as busy as she was he'd have though Jill might have noticed that...except that all she'd done was put them in the bottle for him. She'd handed them to him, forgoing doling out his meds...her first idea...with letting him be an adult and handle them himself. She was too busy to babysit him and he hadn't minded...but he'd been sick and out of it and hadn't noticed what the things looked like....and it looked now, to him, as if he'd been taking an Ambien every six hours rather than a Tramadol.

Unfamiliar with it, he trekked back into Jills med room..finding it just as organized and user friendly as she'd said, and in no time at all had found the drug information he was looking for....feeling a chill of horror and a flood of relief warring their way up his back as he read the cautions that came with it, including the fact that people had been known to commonly peform complicated tasks..such as driving and cooking...while asleep under the effects of this drug..with no memory of it later.

Complicated tasks. 

Dressing Bella. Dressing himself. Hunting.

"Picking poisonous plants and slipping them into the food supply?"

Had he done that?

Fragments of the conversation he'd mostly slept through came back to him...enough to know what Jill and Devin had thought.

They'd thought Tucker was drugging him, setting him up to be irresponsible of his actions so that he could accuse him of being up to no good. 

He could hear Devins voice as clearly as if he were there.

"You think he wants us to throw him out."

"Or worse."

Or worse.

But what if it hadn't been Tucker?

What if it'd been him?

Or..even if it had been Tucker drugging him, what if he'd been the one to poison them? Sleepwalking his way right into his subconscious? Hmmm? What about that?

He was too tired to work up anything much over it, and just gathered up the medications and pitched them into the fire, dragging himself back to the med room to get himself another zpak. At least he could keep trying to knock out the infection and by god it was still there sure as fuck. At least he'd know this time that nobody was fucking around.

He'd never know, that was the hell of it. He'd never know. There was nobody left to tell him.

"Well...there's Bella."

At least, he thought she was here. She had been. And he didn't doubt she knew everything that had been going on. Profoundly brain damaged, cortical blindness, mute, deaf....his hairy white ass.  
That little girl saw everything, and she WATCHED. She listened.   
He knew Devin thought he'd been massively overestimating her intellect, and maybe he was, a bit...but she knew what was going on.

Not that she could tell him.

No.

But she knew, and he thought her behavior toward him might just tell him what he needed to know.

If she ever came out...and if she didn't he supposed he'd have to go look for her, get her fed, get her clean, get her dry, get her warm.

If she let him.

He glanced into the pot, and saw the water steaming...found a washcloth and dropped it in..thought about it for a minute and fished it out again, pouring some of the water off into another bowl. 

If he got blood and crud in the pot he'd have to dump it out and start over and damn but he was too tired to do that.

He'd about halfway finished sluicing himself off....buck naked in front of the fire and wouldn't you know it, when he heard something behind him. Just a rustle, but familiar enough, and he didn't turn around, instead addressing his remark to the fire.

"Not a word from you about me bein in my altogether."  
He got a weird little grunt from her, something he'd never heard before, and he glanced over his shoulder...didn't see her.

"Girl, where are you?"  
He finished fast, slipping into clean sweats and taping a clean bandage over the shoulder wound before he slipped on a shirt and went looking for her.

He found her in his room...shivering, soaked and silent, eyes wandering every which way, and he didn't bother with conversation, instead simply picking her up and bringing her to the fire, feeling her stiffen in his arms as he approached their beds.  
"It's all cleaned up little girl, don't worry."  
He'd never really spoken to her gently....always gruff, always sarcastic...mostly because she seemed to like it, and his soft tone now seemed to take her apart.

He felt her tremble in his arms, saw her eyes fill up and nodded as he set her down on Devins bed.

"I know. Wish I could tell you it's not like you think but the thing is...it probably is."

He poured hot water into a clean bowl and dipped in a cloth, bringing it to her face.

"Whatever you saw, and little one you don't know how bad I wish you could tell me, I'm sorry as hell you had to see it. That any of it happened."

He wiped her face, touching his fingertips to her tears.

"Your daddy, he told me you never cry. Guess he didn't know so much."

He worked his way down, stripping off soaked clothes as he went, not wanting to expose her all at once. She was tiny, but she was old enough to afford a little dignity...and it was still damn cold in here. She didn't look at him, didn't react at all, really, and it bothered him. What had she seen? Bad enough her family was gone, but had she had to watch it happen? He didn't know...suspected she had...and what the hell was there to do for any little kid who'd seen the kind of violence that had happened here?   
It was a goddamned violent world, now, and he supposed it busted into peoples supposed safe havens all over the place, but those people weren't his.

She was, and it hurt.

It didn't take him long to have her clean, dry, diapered and dressed, zipped , still shivering, into her sleeping bag and as close to the fire as he dared while he went to get her ensure. That she hadn't once looked at him, had made no sound at all....

And what was he going to do with her? 

He came back in, found her entirely tunnelled down into the bag.

Hiding.

He got it, and if she hadn't been god knew how many days with no sustenance whatsoever he wouldn't have bothered her...giving her a little time while he warmed the Ensure bottle in the steam pot.  
If she'd been drinking it it would have tasted like boiled crap and he knew it, but it was only going down a tube, and as cold as she was, warm was the only way he was willing to consider.

He patted the sleeping bag, found her foot, patted it harder.

"Gonna unzip you now. You gotta eat, baby girl."

Nothing....nothing.

Sighing, he unzipped her, tried to catch her eye and failed, rubbing her belly a little, as he'd taken to doing whenever it was him feeding her. It seemed to help decrease her discomfort after, and he felt her relaxing under his touch, now.  
"Wish I could fix this, Bells. I really do. Wish a lot of things..."

His voice dropped into a soft rhythm as he unstoppered the tube and trickled the stuff in. 

"Wish I knew what happened, cuz I don't, y'know. Wish I knew if I hurt them. Don't think I did or you wouldn't be here I don't think but wish I knew. Wish I could bring 'em back for you. Wish this whole thing had never happened. No monsters out there. No..."

His voice broke and he forced it back.

"No monsters in here. This isn't how it's supposed to be. You should be in some nice safe house somewhere, with your own room all soft and full of girly stuff. Goin to school. Comin home and skippin your homework and watchin tv and talkin on the phone. Cept it's not talkin anymore, it's TEXTING. And even with the life you ended up with, you shouldn't be here. You should still be in some nice safe house with people who understand you, and who get you, and who know how smart you are. Who can maybe come up with some way for you to talk to people. Not sitting in and old fort, half frozen with the likes of me, everyone we both know gone, monsters out the door....it aint right."

Her eyes had turned to his, briefly, when he'd said "everybody we both know" and he nodded, setting aside the bottle and capping the tube again, tucking it into her shirt and lifting her out of the sleeping bag while he climbed in, settling her against him and zipping them both up. They were both still shivering, deep inside..and he knew it was as much shock as cold, but this would help.

"It's true. All my people are gone, too. Mostly they weren't worth a fart in a tin shed..."  
He heard the faintest little hoot at that, and kissed her head, smiling a little himself.  
"But they were all I had. My brother...Merle? Awful. Worst kind of asshole. Couldn't stand him. But he was my brother and I'll tell you what, I miss him still. It's how this world is, now. Don't know why, so don't ask me, but it's just kinda how it went." He slid down a little, bringing her with him, feeling both of their shivers start to ease up.   
"Looks like we're all we got, now, huh little girl? For now, anyway. For the winter. Maybe when it's warm we'll go find some new people."  
He felt himself starting to drift...warmth stealing him away, and he felt her relaxing in his arms, thought it might just be stealing her too.  
"Wish you could tell me what you saw, little Bella. You're the only one who knows."  
Sleep was abruptly competing with tears, and he heard his trigger hers and held her tighter.  
"Wish you could tell me. God..."   
He swiped at his eyes, tried to reign it in, failed.  
"I just want to know I didn't hurt 'em, y'know? I just want to know..."  
Her hand, resting on his, tapped and twisted, seemingly random until it caught his finger, reflex catching and gripping, and he heard her sigh, felt her foot deliberately kick at him...not angry, not frightened...the matter of fact kick she always gave him when she wanted his attention, and he suspected he was either being offered some kind of reassurance or being told to shut up.

Either way, he kissed her head again and let himself be.  
Let them both cry if they needed to, who was here to mind?  
Warm now, and safe enough for now, he drifted off with her in his arms, soothed by the little ticking motion of her hand in his.

Bella, warm yes, and utterly safe from her perspective, didn't sleep.  
She didn't, much, anyway, and now she was too worried..in her own unique way...in thoughts comprised mainly of ideas instead of words, made up of whole emotions, riffs of imagery, waves of sound...to sleep.

If her parents and teachers had underestimated her intellect, Daryl had slightly overcredited her, and the majority of his words to her weren't understood. She caught ideas, tones, emotions....some words, sure...she had a working mental vocabulary, but it wasn't the way other people thought or understood.

Still....she knew what was going on, knew what people were talking about most of the time, her understanding unique to her and understandable only by her.   
She knew , now, what he was afraid of.

If she could have spoken, she could have told him he was right...she did know what had happened. She had seen.

 

Could have told him that it wasn't him who had hurt any of them...that it was Tucker who had hurt him, who had gone after all of them. Tucker who had done it all. Tucker, and she'd never liked Tucker.

Truth of it was, she didn't much like her dad, either, or Jill. They didn't like her, didn't care about her, didn't think she knew things. Didn't like them...but they were hers and that they were gone hurt her. 

Daryl, though....she loved Daryl. Loved the rumble of his voice, and that he talked to her like she was there. Loved the way he smelled, the way his foot felt when she kicked it, the way his hands rubbed her tummy. Loved that he loved her.   
Even when he'd been so scary...when he'd been so scared and mad and ready to hurt everybody she'd loved him...she'd kept away, for a while, because alone was what he'd needed, and she knew he thought it was because she was afraid of him and if she could have she'd have told him...she'd never been afraid of him. He'd never been going to hurt them...and he wouldn't ever hurt her.

She'd never really wished she could talk....she'd never known it, didn't miss it, the same way she didn't miss walking or moving the way other people did...but sometimes....like now...she wished she could talk for other people.  
He was scared...she could feel it, and she knew why, and as she settled in to wait for him to wake up...comfortable and warm she didn't mind that she couldn't move around right now...she wished more than anything that she could tell him he hadn't hurt anybody.


	16. Chapter 16

There was something wrong with Bella.

Well..there was plenty wrong with Bella, and he wondered sometimes if he was only just beginning to notice everything that was really wonky about her, but there was something going on.

Granted they were both in rough shape.

He'd been poisoned and she'd been starved and frozen for God knew how many days and neither one of them seemed to be inclined to bounce back from it, something that was all too clear to him as he once again hauled himself out of bed and forced himself to add to the fire, add to the water, check the supplies..and he supposed he'd have to do a quick check of the fort, though why the fuck it was necessary when there wasn't a goddamned soul anywhere for miles was beyond him.

He was tired.

Tired and slipping and he knew it and couldn't much bring himself to care. Part of it, of course, was malnutrition. 

It wasn't that there wasn't plenty of food...there was...it was just that he couldn't eat it. Whatever it was that Tucker had tried to do him in with....he kept telling himself it was Tucker, had to have been....had played merry hell with his innards and his guts felt stripped raw.

Anything beyond tiny sips of clear liquids set up a queasy burning in his stomach that more often than not left him puking into the floor drain and he'd been alarmed to see streaks of blood coming up more than once...and that was nothing compared to what was going on down below. He hadn't stopped pissing out his asshole yet and that was more than streaked...he was bleeding like a stuck pig and he supposed that had a lot to do with this lethal lack of energy as well.

He'd tried pretty much everything he could think of to set things straight, beginning with Bella's Ensure....horrible idea, the stuff was milk based and he was in so much pain that day he hadn't been able to move, and he wondered if it did the same thing to her...she surely didn't look forward to it, that was obvious.

He'd worked his way through every remedy he'd ever heard of, but nothing had seemed to do much of anything for him and he'd gone back to just sipping at anything clear he could find, and so far he was holding on....barely but hell, it was better than nothing. 

Time, he figured, would either heal him up or kill him, and either way there wasn't much he could do about it. 

At least he knew what was wrong with him.

With the kid it was a guessing game, and he found himself spending more and more time sitting in the corner watching her, chewing his nailbeds bloody as he tried to figure out what the fuck was going on, reminding himself that he already knew she wouldn't survive...it was a given, a done deal..she was too medically fragile and sooner or later something was going to go wrong that he didn't have the resources to fix....probably already had....and he should just keep in mind that he was only keeping her going as a....a..what.  
A courtesy?

Fuck that. She was all he had, and he could tell himself not to get attached to her all he wanted, he LIKED her and he didn't want to lose her.

Didn't want to FAIL her.

Because of course, if he failed to do what a million experts had already failed to do it was just because he sucked.

Sighing, now, as he made his cursory tramp through the compound, stepping over Bella every couple of minutes, it occurred to him to wonder if there was any information in what he'd come to think of as Bellas torture chamber.

He'd found the room on one of his earlier rounds....in a section of the fort he'd previously stayed away from, given that it was where the others stored all their shit and he had no interest in their shit.

He'd stepped into the room and frozen, for a moment unsure what in the world he could possibly be looking at, ignoring the little disgruntled hoots coming from around his feet....and goddamn it'd taken him a while to learn not to fall over her...since the loss of her family she'd taken to winding herself around his feet like a goddamned cat and he'd had to fight her to get her to stay the fuck outta the latrine and let him at least piss on his own...and wasn't it funny that he'd gotten so good at interpreting her sounds, and these were not pleased little hoots coming from her, not at all.

"What's y'problem, girl, huh?"

He'd gone in, eyes and brain finally connecting the dots even as Bella gave an outraged, alarmed shout, aimed a good solid kick at his leg and took off, angry hoots following in her wake, and he'd hollered after her without thinking "Language, girl, what the fuck!" and thinking that her opinion on this shit was clear as a goddamn bell.

He supposed the thing in front of him was a wheelchair, but it was like nothing he'd ever seen before. Always mechanically adept, he had no trouble figuring out how it worked, and it was made to hold her in one fixed position...swing away shoulder pads, lateral supports, a pommel to keep her knees apart, foot straps....once in that thing she'd be completely immobile and given that she never stopped moving he could see why she'd have hated it. Parked next to it was something like the walkers he'd seen old folks using...but weirdly designed....backward...rigged with dozens of straps that no doubt held her in place in that, too. Granted she'd be able to get around but nowhere near as quickly as she did on her own, and with a whole lot more effort. 

He'd picked up a duffel, thrown into the corner, unzipped it and found little plastic leg braces, half a doze file folders, a thick sheaf of paperwork, and a photo album.

Uninterested in any of it, he'd tossed it back down and left the room, calling out into the air "What, you don't like that shit? They get that stuff for you so you wouldn't wind around their goddamn feet all day and knock 'em down like y'do me?"

She'd pretty well told him off and he'd laughed..but he knew he hadn't been far off the mark. Oh no doubt they'd told themselves all that shit was "corrective" and made to help her but the reality was it kept her where they could see her.

Now, watching her uneven progress across the floor....she was having real trouble getting around now, her movements even more uncoordinated than they normally were...and noting the bizarre thing she'd started to do....and he'd seen it more and more often over the last few days...one whole side of her body seeming to seize up, curled in tight and quivering, even the eye on that side pulling toward her ear...halting her progress until it quit...he decided it was time to visit that room again and see if there was anything in any of that paperwork that would tell him what to do about this.

He knew it was some kind of seizure, suspected they probably had been giving her some kind of meds but he was damned if he had any idea what or how much. 

He spoke to her now, offhand.

"Goin' to that room you hate, I wan't to read up on you. You don't have to go if you don't want to. 'less you want to try out your chair for old times sake."

The kick she aimed at him was not only halfhearted but it missed, and he nodded.

"Yeah, see? That. You never miss. We gotta fix that, little girl."

Not that he had any faith he could, but what the hell, he'd give it his best shot. Wasn't like he had anything else to do except sip broth, puke down the drain and piss out his asshole. 

"We're a goddamn disaster, me and you, you noticed that?"

He got a snort back and smiled.

"Speak for myself, huh? Awright. Hang here, I'm goin to get your bag and see what all the experts had to say about you. Probly all wrong anyway...."

He'd ignored the torture devices, tossed the braces out of the bag and brought back only the paperwork and the pictures....part of him suddenly curious about what her life had been like before...and settled himself next to the fire with his glasses and his broth, laughing to himself at what he must look like, and what Merle would think.

"My brother...he'd be pissin himself right now, I can tell you that. Me sittin here like someones Gramps, sippin at m'broth and peerin over m'bifocals. How the mighty have fuckin fallen."

Just a faint hoot, and he glanced up at her, frowning.

Nothing weird going on, but she was pretty limp and listless for her, and it crossed his mind to wonder if maybe she was just...sad.

"What's goin on, Bell? You sick or do you miss them?"

He knew she'd hate it but he didn't care, got up and scooped her off the floor, noting both her extra warmth and the lack of a fight, worry settling in around his heart like some old friend.

"Both, maybe, huh? Me too. Like I said..disaster."

He settled back down with her, wishing like hell she'd argue with him or try to get down...anything but hang limply in his arms like some kind of living ragdoll.

"Keepin you off that floor for a little bit. Too damn cold, specially if you're gettin sick."

She didn't respond, just gazed vaguely through the fingers of her left hand...her good one, he now knew, the one she could actually use a little bit, something he wondered if any of the experts had ever even noticed...too quiet, too limp, too everything that wasn't Bella.

Sighing, he shifted her a little to one side and went back to the files, his brothers voice suddenly in his head....invoked, he supposed, by his amusement over what Merle would have thought of all this....his voice, booming out what he himself already knew, didn't care to hear, didn't want to think.

"Boy, you know she's gonna die, why you even bothering? Said it yourself when you first laid eyes on her...stupid to waste the time and resources to keep her alive when she's not gonna make it anyway. Just gonna get yourself all worked up for nothing...."

He growled a little to himself, mentally told his brother... and himself... to fuck off, and held her a little tighter.

No....she wouldn't live a long life, wouldn't have regardless...but that really wasn't the point. 

What the point was he really wasn't sure.


	17. Chapter 17

He looked up from the stack of files and cast his gaze around for Bella. 

Unlike her to not be at his feet, but she seemed to be taking exception to his going through her history. She'd been sulking ever since he brought back her paperwork. 

"Girl, where you at?"

He got nothing, shook his head, turned back to what he'd been reading. Most of it was greek to him...a lot of long medical terms that seemed to him to be the more politically correct way to say aaaaaaaaalllll fucked up, and he'd gone and gotten Jill's big medical dictionary, wishing with every word he looked up that he hadn't done it. There did't seem to be much that HADN'T gone wrong with this kid. So be it, they could say what they wanted, it had no real relevance now other than to potentially help him keep her alive....or just point out to him in blinding clarity that he couldn't.

Some of this shit was terrifying. 

Her brain was too small...not missing, as her father had said...and most of it didn't work.

Her head kept filling up with fluid because the ducts meant to drain it didn't work. 

Her throat didn't connect to her stomach...and if what he was reading was right that was something that could have been fixed...but they'd opted to leave it be and use the tube instead...why in hell would they have done that? There was a lot in there that sounded like for a while everything she'd swallowed went into her lungs, and they'd fixed THAT so she wouldn't drown in her own spit but why not fix all of it?

There was nobody to ask.

 

He'd been right that she'd been on seizure meds, and a search through the med room made it obvious that Jill had stockpiled them. The problem was, they were all different and all measured in different doses. How in hell was he supposed to know how much to give her of what? 

Then there was the shunt.

He'd had no damned clue what that was when he'd read it until he'd found a diagram...and realized that the thing he'd been feeling in her neck all this time...and he'd wondered about it, hadn't asked....was there draining fluid from her head into her gut.

Not so scary in and of itself, but the sheaf of paperwork regarding everything that had ever gone wrong with it was causing a none too mild panic...and a dark suspicion that it was going wrong again. She'd been hitting herself in the head, weird even for her, and he'd wondered if she had a headache, if he should give her some tylenol...a thought that made him laugh a little, now.

Tylenol.

If her shunt was blocked, or not working, or infected or any of the dozens of other issues that could arise, Tylenol would be like putting a bandaid on a slit throat. 

Sighing, he shoved it all away from him and dropped his head into his hands, rubbing absently at the headache that had started behind his eyes, exhaustion dropping onto him like a stone.

There had been people here who would have known what was wrong, known what to do....dead now and the worry that it had been at his hand wouldn't let him go.

Had he killed them? Killed her, now? Christ, if what he'd read was what was going on she'd be in agony. Maybe already was, she was so goddamned stoic she might never let him know. And what about those seizures? Did they hurt? Was she just...suffering? He didn't know, wouldn't have been able to fix it even if he had.  
Helpless desperation joined exhaustion, the weight falling on him like a ten ton safe.

Too much. For both of them, just...too much.

Not for the first time...hell, far from it, it'd been coming to him dozens of times a day now....the thought crossed his mind that the most merciful thing he could do for either of them was a quick bullet to each of their brains. She'd never need to know it was coming, and if he waited until she was asleep it'd be over before she ever knew a thing. Him...he didn't care. It didn't matter. One flash of brilliant light and done. Gone. Over.

It had become darkly fascinating and he drifted into it...something he'd done with alarming frequency lately...eyes drifting to the ceiling and glazing over, face slack and lifeless, frozen there in his dark dream of non existence.

It would be hours before he'd emerge, as he had every other time this had happened because he was really, truly losing his mind this time wasn't he......with Bella kicking at his feet and shouting at him...so stiff every motion screamed shooting agony, soaked in spit and urine, blackly terrified. 

And as he'd done every other time, he'd pull himself out of the chair, strip off his wet clothes and slip into knew ones, pick the little girl up and set her to rights...because she was generally likewise soaked in piss, freezing and thirsty and frightened....his mind swimming with images he hated but couldn't seem to shake...himself putting a pillow over her face, his hands around that fragile little throat, his gun to her head....guilt tearing at him as he looked into her face, thinking that she trusted him and here he was balanced right on the edge of snapping and doing away with her as he probably had everyone else who had been here.

Most times he'd finish with her, zip her into her sleeping bag and retreat, as fast and as far as he could, hoping the darkness would lift before he hurt either of them and so far it had.

This time would be different.

This time, on the edge, he'd come as close as he ever had...closer even than the night she'd put herself between him and her people....ever would again in his life, to the unthinkable.   
This time he'd learn, finally and forever, just exactly who and what he was...what he'd always been, and what this new world had made him.

This particular time, something in him.....over it, finished with it, simply no longer willing to allow it...WOULD snap. Snap and shut him down like a tripped breaker, every fuse blown to hell and back, synapses firing at random in what he would later decide must have been a storm of self initiated ECT.

He'd never know what had caused it...his mind, his poisoned, starved, exhausted body, or some divine force finally looking out for him...and he didn't care. 

There was too much stubborn in Daryl, too much steel...and he had his sanity in a deathgrip, unwilling to let it go even drowning in a flood of helplessness, rage and terror.

He never really knew what was happening, knew only that he'd made his decision. As soon as he got her cleaned up and dry he was putting her to bed and dumping as many narcotics down that tube as he could, and when she was out...for good and forever...he was putting a bullet in her head and then his own. 

Decision made.

Done deal.

Except he could't get the goddamned pad around the tube.

It kept getting wet....why he had no idea, how not a clue...but he couldn't put a wet pad around the hole in her belly....the place that tube ran inside her. It had to be clean, it had to be dry, and he couldn't leave it off. The tube rubbed at the edges of he hole, irritated her skin, left it raw and bleeding and painful. He had to get a pad on there. A dry pad. 

They kept soaking through.

He wasn't about to quit until he found one that would stay dry.

Why he was worried about this small pain on the abdomen of a little girl he was about to kill never even crossed his mind....and he'd realize later that it'd likely been held out of reach by the part of his mind that had finally decided, in utter disgust, that it'd better get involved before he did something stupid. 

Held out of reach, like the knowledge that the pads were soaking through because he was crying....horrific, screaming, howling crying that echoed through the building, tears coming thick and hot and dripping down onto his hands, her belly, the pads...

He had no idea.

He just knew they were wet and that wouldn't fucking do, not at all.

And his goddamn hands were shaking. How was he supposed to get anything done when his hands wouldn't quit trembling like that.

At least she wasn't fighting him, there was that.

She was just laying there, staring through her hand at nothing, limp but for the occasional shiver, as uninterested in him as if she hadn't just been kicking the living shit out of his feet. 

Not that it was doing much good, her stillness, because his own shivers were suddenly tearing through him, pulling his hands away, pulling his head back so he couldn't see, and what the fuck WAS this?

First the goddamn pads, then his goddamn hands, and now he was shivering so hard he was seizing up, unable to do anything...and it was a goddamned shame that hadn't happened before, when he'd probably poisoned everyone in the fucking place, yeah, it really was. Saved all this misery if he'd only...  
But he hadn't. Tucker had. TUCKER had.

"It wasn't fucking me! It was him!"

His voice, choked as it was on those screaming sobs, ricocheted through the emptiness and arrowed back into his head, startling him into another bout of shivers, these so intense they arched him backward and he felt himself falling, cursing as his fingers let go the dry pad he'd finally nearly affixed beneath the tube.

"Dammit!"

Nothing was working. Nothing. 

His hands stole into his hair and pulled, the pain too small and not at all the focus he'd hoped for, though it seemed to migrate downward into his throat, a stroking, wracking sort of stab that started him gagging, forced him up onto his knees, turning away from Bella as he retched up bile and spit, barely holding himself up as the shakes took him over, dragging in a breath that felt like drowning through a mouth full of vomit and a nose full of tears, hacking it back out as his eyes turned toward her and the darkness descended on him again, an urgent voice in his head screaming at him to do it now, do it quick, before he fell out completely.

Do it now. Do it quick.

He thought later he might have started to reach for her....wasn't sure, wouldn't, probably, ever be sure but he thought he had...and then his mindbrainbody had slammed the brakes on everything.

One flash....much like the one he'd imagined at the moment of impact between bullet and brain...one flash of light so bright it seared its way into his eyes and he saw the sunspot left behind for hours....and the sound of an explosion and he had just enough time to wonder if he'd gone on ahead and shot himself...and every muscle in his body went rigid.

The pain was enormous.  
It was huge.  
Riveting.  
Devastating.

He couldn't move, couldn't breathe! his back arched, head pulled back so far he thought the back of his head must be touching the soles of his feet and he couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe, couldn't...

Another flash, another crack of sound...and the world was gone.

....................................................................................................................................................

 

Bella was only peripherally aware of Daryls agonies as his body convulsed on the floor next to her, and of his murderous intent not at all....not that she would have cared if she'd known.

He was right in his suspicions about her shunt...it was blocked, inflamed, infected, and by the time she'd even begun to feel warm enough to the touch for him to notice she was sick the infection had reached a point that nothing he could have ever given her would have helped.

What she needed....an emergency room, a pediatric neurologist, IV antibiotics and a new shunt....didn't exist any longer, and her final decline had already begun.

Increasing pressure in her brain had dimmed her awareness and she was only herself in rapidly shortening increments, most of the time drifting in a twilight very close to Daryls black oblivion, and the only thing capable now of pulling her out of it was pain....and the pain in her head, in her belly...was very bad.

It pulled at her now and she turned to look for him, found him next to her, choking on spit and twitching, and her eyes went dark as they regarded him, as her brain struggled to connect.

She'd seen what was happening to him before.

Concerned, now, she wriggled herself around and scooted to his other side to see his face....hampered and frustrated by the whole right side of her body, weak now as pressure in her brain pressed in all the wrong ways....finally managing to maneuver herself to where she could look at him, taking in his eyes, closed to slits and showing white, the random twitches that flung him up off the floor, little jumps that might have made her giggle at any other time, the heavy, thick rattle of his breathing.

Sick. He was sick. And before that he'd been sad.

She couldn't do anything about sick. She was sick, herself.

Sad though, that she could work with, and for him.....for him, because she loved him...she would.

She wiggled in close, as close as she could get, and then made the most enormous...and it would be the last...effort of her life.

..................................................................................................................................................

He woke up slowly, shaking and weak with no real idea what had happened, confused in general about it all and speficically about a stabbing, pulling pain in his scalp and a heaviness to his chest he was having trouble breathing around.

Of his determination to end both of their lives he remembered nothing, and in fact the last several hours were not only muddy...they were gone.

His timeline seemed to jump from reading about Bella to waking up now.

Had he passed out?

He reached up to rub his eyes and hit an obstacle, took a shaky breath that felt clogged and thick and burst into a fit of coughing that almost grayed him out again....and that increased that bizarre pain in his scalp. 

What the hell?

He tried to move...discovered a warm heaviness draped across his body and slid a hand onto it.

Bella. Even with his eyes closed his touch recognized that mop of wiry hair. Bella. Lying on top of him???

His eyes flew open, filling with tears even as his arm came up and went around her, as he realized what the pain in his scalp was.

Bella, who couldn't get herself an inch off the floor and onto a futon mattress, had somehow managed to clamber onto him and was stretched out, her belly pressed to his, her cheek snuggled into his neck.   
Bella, who didn't cuddle, didn't hug....had somehow worked that precious left hand she was so protective of behind his neck and up into his hair...gripping tight and pulling every time he moved and it hurt, but he found he didn't give a sweet goddamn.

This little girl...who did not do this...was hugging him with every bit of strength in her little body, and he hugged her back, a wave of affection bursting over him to rival the confusion.

Something had happened, something his mind told him on no uncertain terms to leave the fuck alone...and he heeded that warning and let it go..noting the belly pads and snagging one as he picked himself....and Bella....up off the floor, staggering a little and suddenly seized with a grinding fear that he'd fall with her in his arms or drop her.

Jesus.

He set her down on his bed, reaching around to pry her fingers out of his hair, alarm bells clanging through him at the heat coming off her, at her lack of response.

"Bella...."

He shook her a little, turned her face to his, relief surging through him as her eyes flickered open.

"Girl, you in there?"

A whisper of a sigh that might have been intended to be a hoot, and he sat back, took her in.  
Sick as hell, no doubt about it, and he reached out and turned her head to the side, taking in the red, swollen bulge that ran down her neck, touched it gently, felt it's heat, its hardness.  
"This thing's all kinds of messed up, huh?"

He sighed, knowing there was nothing he could do, determined, anyway, to try.

"Gonna put you back together a little bit, yeah?"

Maybe. Maybe he was gonna just pass out again, and he swore at himself as he got her changed with shaking hands, got the belly pad in place....some bizarre, niggling half memory of the things being wet tried to come forward and he pushed it viciously back with no idea why....and pulled himself up...holding onto the wall and riding the ensuing headrush for what felt like an hour...staggering off to the med room for antibiotics, to the storeroom for her ensure and a few bottles of pedialyte.

Christ he was tired, and his whole body felt like he'd been run over. His tongue ached abominably, and he could taste rotted metal in his mouth.

What the fuck?

He spat...brown and bloody, wincing at the renewed pain in his tonge. He'd bitten it, sure as shit, but why?

He shook it off. It didn't matter. 

Bella mattered, and he limped back to her, dropping down next to her, noting the shivers running through her.

"Oh, sweetheart...."

He wasn't going to save her, he knew it. Still, giving up seemed the deepest form of disrespect and he sighed, drew a dose of augmentin he knew was a little on the heavy side into a syringe and flipped her tube open one handed, pushing the meds in and following it up with a pediatlyte chaser.

It probably wouldn't help, but it wouldn't hurt and you never knew...

He watched her for a little while, alternating syringfulls of pedialyte and ensure until she started to wiggle a bit and he knew it was all she could hold....until his own strength gave out and he stretched out next to her, not sure whether to smile or cry when her hand slid across his neck and went for his hair again.

"What's that, that a Bella hug? What's up with that? You goin all soft on me, girl?"

Nothing, not even a sigh, but she didn't let go and he nodded, felt them both shivering and reached down to pull his sleeping bag up over both of them.

Something had happened to him. He wasn't sure what, but whatever it was it'd laid him out and she'd been worried, she'd managed to climb up on him and hug him...was working so hard to keep doing that now. Comforting him...even though the effort it cost her was huge, and he suspected she was dying.

God...and to think he'd ever even once thought this little girl shouldn't have been kept alive. 

He hugged her hard enough to make her squirm, smiled a little at it as he kissed her hair, loosened up...and felt his breath catch in his throat as her arms tightened around him.

"I know, Bells. I love you too."

He drifted off to the feel of her fingers moving in his hair, soft....slight...seaweed moving in a current.

...................................................................................................................................................

He wasn't sure how many days passed....it all blurred into an agonizing routine that destroyed time and chipped away at his soul.

Her fever soared....he'd finally quit checking when it read 105.2...and with it her seizures came, hard and fast and in clusters and nothing he did calmed them at all.   
He spent the days sponging her down with cool water, pushing meds and fluids into her tube, talking to her, reading to her, singing to her...something that always made her giggle but now didn't so much as make her blink....not knowing if she could hear him but wanting her to know he was there, just in case....until finally the day came that he noticed her diaper had been dry all night, all morning...fluids were going in, none were coming out. Well...maybe she was just that dehydrated.

Sighing, knowing better, he picked up the pedialyte, uncapped the tube...and froze at the sight of fluid brimming right to the cap.  
Puzzled for a second, he pulled the tube straighter, expecting to see the fluid go down...but no. No, it stayed right there.

Frowing, he capped it off, touched her belly....found it hard...saw her flinch...and pulled his hand away...brought it up over his mouth, not in sickness but in horrified grief, the other shoving into his eyes, tears spilling over, hot and hard and burning.

Nothing was going anywhere. Everything he'd given her was now just staying there. She was shutting down and probably all he was doing now was torturing her.

He shook himself, forced his hands away from his face. 

Fine. He was damned if she was going to suffer his mistake.

He uncapped the tube and let it run out, not worried about where it was going. Anything that hit the floor eventually ended up down the drain anyway and he didn't give a damn regardless.  
When it stopped drainig, and her little belly felt soft to his finger, when she no longer flinched away, he capped it back up, tucked it in, stretched out beside her and took her hand.

"Just me and you and a whole lotta time to rest now, Bells."

He thought he might have felt her fingers tighten on his, thought he might have just been wishing, thought it really didn't matter, and pulled her in close to him.

How long they stayed that way, how long he held her and listened for every breath he wasn't sure, but it didn't feel like long.

No, it didn't feel like very long at all before those little breaths began to space out...the gaps coming longer and longer as his tears spilled into her hair and he heard his own voice sobbing words at her...what he was saying he didn't know, didn't care, didn't think about...and then, suddenly, heartstoppingly, her hand was on his cheek, in his tears and they were splashing back into his face because her hand was moving.

Patting.

It was too much...she was comforting him and it was killing him, and he resorted to what she'd always liked best in him.

"Aw girl, don't fucking be all nice to me, you want me to drown you cryin all over your head?"

Her hand stopped and he heard the faintest little hoot just before it moved again...this time no gentle pat, this time it was a full on smack, and he laughed even as a sob tore through and he nodded under her touch.

"Yeah, there y'go. Probly I still ain't gonna quit so you'll just haveta put up with it."

Her hand moved again...pat pat pat... stilled as he picked it up, kissed her fingers, set it back with his folded around it.

"I know you love me. I love you too. Quit it now."

She did, sinking into him and drifting off and he laid there listening to her breathe until she stopped, holding her against him even as he picked up the gun....suddenly unwilling...unable...to put a bullet in this little girls brain just yet.

He held her, crying too hard to see and chances are he would've missed anyway if he'd tried..until he felt her cooling against him and gently moved her, looking at her now and marveling a little.

She didn't look messed up. Yeah her head was too small, her face was too big, her hair was a tufted disaster....but she looked, to him, just about perfect.

"Aw dammit, girl..why you had to do this to me?"

Sighing, trying to wipe out his eyes so he could see, more pissed by the moment as more tears came to chase the ones he'd removed, he finally grunted in frustration and sat back and let himself go....one hand still on the gun....cocked and aimed at her head.

In the end, he never used it.

She didn't turn. 

Hours went by...and she didn't turn. 

The night passed..and he sat up with her, now holding a bizarre sort of vigil...and she didn't turn. By the time daylight had come he'd realized that by some miracle...she wasn't going to.

Nodding, relieved at that, at least, he realized he had another problem.

The ground was still frozen and he couldn't bury her.

Ah well, she'd have hated that anyway.

Nodding again, he picked her up and slipped her into his sleeping bag, zipped it closed and picked her up, heading deep into the depths of the bunkers, where he'd hidden a seeming age ago. He left her in a deep, interior room, where nothing would be likely to ever get at her, making sure every door was damn good and closed as he made his way back out.

Emerging onto the common room...completely alone now, he knew he wasn't staying.

It didn't take him an hour to pack up, fully outfitted and as ready as he could be to go back out there. 

He made sure the fire was out...made sure the place was neat, though why he couldn't have said...and was about to step out the door when something occurred to him and he turned back...went and found the little photo album that had been with her things. Thumbing through it, wincing a little at the pictures of her in therapy, in that hated chair, strapped into standing tables and walkers, he finally came across the one he was looking for. He'd smiled over it when he'd found it the first time, and now he slipped it out of the protective plastic with another smile and zipped it into a deep pocket in his coat. 

A little pigtailed girl, caught in joyful mid wiggle, sun dappled and laughing on the soft grass of some park, somewhere, in some other life.

He headed for the door again and this time he didn't look back.

He stepped out into the cold, locked the door behind him, slipped the keys into another pocket....hell, you never knew....and moved off into the woods...alone and out in the world of the dead again.


	18. Interlude in the woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a little bridge.

The wood were quiet. Cold and clean and seemingly empty of anyone, living or dead, and as he moved through them, always resolutely north...that hadn't changed...a bizarre clearing out process began, a purging of everything he'd ever been.

The temperature plummetted that first night out, and he breathed in cold winters air, blew out sadness, loneliness, and that horrific insanity that had gripped him...and as his tears froze on his face....he'd never even realize that for the first few days he'd been crying as he walked, or that the stinging, biting pain in his face came from those frozen tears....all of the ideas of the old world washed out and froze with them, eventually dropping to the ground and lost.

His time in the fort had made it clear to him that he was clinging to things...ideas..that no longer held any relevance. His unwillingness to unseat Tucker because he'd been there first. His dangerous ambivalence toward the others, based on old ideas of territory and ownership and kindness coming into direct conflict with the brutal need to survive.

His attachment to that little girl...a touchstone to the old world, where you could afford to love a child because you could protect them and would never have to simply sit and watch them die because there was no help available and no information to let you even attempt to save them.

Never again.

The world had changed and ownership meant nothing. Territory belonged to the strongest. If you needed it and could take it, you had to, and if you did, it was yours until someone stronger came along and took it from you. 

Reality.

Survival.

He didn't know what had happened to the people who had taken him in...if it had been his hand or Tuckers....though even if it had been Tuckers actual hand that had dropped the poison into the cookpot it had been his....Daryl Dixons and nobody elses...knowledge that enabled whichever hand had actually done the deed. He'd taught them which plants were lethal and yeah, sure, it was possible...likely, the insistently sane part of his mind stubbornly insisted...that Tucker had acted on his murderous intent when Daryl hadn't, but it had been Daryl who supplied the knowledge to power that intent. 

Either way, it was on him.

Had he simply done what he knew he needed to do...taken the place...gotten rid of Tucker...right from the start, three innocent people might still be alive.

Old ideas had stopped him. Old habits. Old visions of right and wrong and decency. 

If he'd done anything....if it HAD been him, in some crazy blackout...it had been him acting to survive and nothing more and he'd driven himself insane trying to reconcile need with obsolete ideas.

Never.  
Ever.  
Again.

It ran out of him, in streams on his breath, his tears...all of the anger, all of the guilt, all of the pain for what had happened to those people and that little girl. All need or desire to be social, to hear other human voices, to feel other human touch plumed out with every exhalation, all longing for the old world, for friends, for comfort...physical or emotional it didn't matter, because this world wasn't about comfort it was about survival...and as he drank down stream and brook water, cold...some frozen over and he loved the sound as he cracked through the ice...and fresh and unpolluted, he felt it washing him clean on the inside...later voiding it out onto the frozen ground along with every old memory, every faint nostalgia, every leftover shred of his old humanity.

By the time he encountered his first dead, he was as husked out and empty as they were.


	19. Chapter 19

Human beings think. Constantly and without cease, human beings think...a constant running mental movie comprised of memories, ideas, worries, joys....each possessed of a unique and distinct mental voice, minds eye imagery, imagination.

At some point along the way, whether through the remaining winter months or the hellish summer since he'd left the fort, Daryl's mind had mutated into something no longer quite human, and he'd stopped thinking.

He didn't realize it, of course. If you're no longer party to your own mental dialog you aren't aware it isn't there, and his awareness had become one of immediacy and nothing more.

He was in the moment...each moment...as it came, and he did whatever he had to do to continue to exist during that moment, but he did it without thought, without ponderance, without calling on memories or bringing forth ideas. 

He simply did what he needed to do to make it to the next moment, forever in the now, his mind silent.

His knowledge was there, to be sure, and it wasn't as if he had amnesia. He remembered what supplies he had, what they were for, knew when, where and how to get more...always in an immediacy, never "oh damn I'm out of that" or "oh I need to get that" but just "... ... ..." as he did what needed to be done. 

He didn't think about anything. He had no mental voice. 

That this was some kind of bizarre psychosis was entirely probable, more likely an extremety of defense. He wasn't lonely. Or sad. Or happy. 

Inert. 

Neutral.

Intensley physical, driven by body in way he never had been before, his entire existence was made up of the need to eat, eliminate, sleep, wake and masturbate. He did not dream and he did not fantasize, and everything was simply maintainence.   
As the idea of people receded from his awareness he became something less than human, something more than animal....an organic bundle of survival instinct shaped like a man, and as months passed so did his sense of self. He was no longer HIM, exactly. He simply was. 

He'd seen few of the dead since leaving the sanctuary of the fort...his instinct about going north correct, and as it got colder the dead became sparse...became slow, and as he trekked further north his encounters with the living became so scattered they almost ceased to exist.

Early on he'd run into several groups of the living, countless individual roamers much like himself, and each encounter had more firmly solidified his understanding that the living were far and away more dangerous than the dead. It'd been kill or be killed more often than not, and while his tendency now was still to avoid rather than confront, he'd become undeniably dangerous.

Given a confrontation...accidental or otherwise...the only one emerging alive would be him, and he'd killed without thought or mercy more than once when his attempts to avoid contact had proved futile, simply dispatching the offending aggressor without a single word spoken and moving on.

Surviving.

An observer would have been fascinated, and had he been in his own head at all he would have been as well, his behavior well and truly an enigma, for though he was nothing but instinct on feet, his innate decency had suffered no decline whatsoever, and he'd helped dozens of people make it to THEIR next moment without them ever being aware of him, without a moments thought on his part.

Instinct. If there were children he left food. Sometimes supplies he really didn't need. Once, medication.

He'd come across a group as that first summer alone was fading into fall.  
The nights had grown as cold as the days were hot, and he'd been holed up in a little copse of trees, sick for the better part of a week with a sore throat that kept him thirsty and chills that ruined his aim, fever that dulled his senses, headache that kept his eyes mostly closed, a roiling stomach that wouldn't hold food. 

He'd started taking the antibiotics he'd scavenged from the fort, the first batch causing him to break out in a painful, itchy rash, swelling his tongue in his mouth and his eyes shut. He'd stopped taking them immediately, switched to something else, put the offending meds back in his bag for no reason whatsoever, completely on autopilot, and as the second choice did what it was supposed to do he'd gotten up and gone out looking for food he could now keep down, water he could now swallow...and he'd found people.

He'd avoided them immediately, and as silently as he was now able to move they never had any idea he was there. He started from their vicinity...where there were people there was noise and noise drew more things, both living and dead...and caught the smell of sickness. 

He'd turned back, gone to look, seen their composition....three women, two children, a man...the man laid low and simmering with fever, the women engaged in the constant, meaningless , now, to him, drone of conversation. He'd taken it in in once glance, his hand reaching into the bag seemingly on its own and pulling out the bottle of medication that had been poisonous to him. 

He'd waited until dark, waited until there was nobody left but the woman, awake and on watch and had crept up behind her...silent as smoke and she never even knew he was there..and set the bottle down, not six inches from her hand. He'd been gone, back into the woods and almost out of hearing range when her startled cry had come to him and he'd run....almost as quietly as he walked...putting as much distance between them as possible.   
Had they come after him and found him he'd have killed them.

As it was they didn't stand a chance, and whether they'd even tried he'd never know or worry about...he'd never know that the man had lived, the medicine working for him just fine...and they passed from his mind as fast as he passed from their proximity, though the woman had sparked a reaction in his body that kept him up for a while that night, one hand pinching and thumbing a nipple, the other working his dick, no thought of the woman in his mind at all, just his pheromones reacting to hers in an act no more sensual than pissing.

It never crossed his mind..it couldn't...that had he not..still...been the man he was he'd have simply taken the woman. Crept up behind her and pulled her into the woods, so quickly and quietly nobody in her camp would ever have known...pulled her into the woods and taken her and never mind waiting to jack off later.  
Because it had never come to him that he could have done it, it never even dawned on him that he hadn't and he slept with no inkling that his humanity hadn't gone anywhere, was simply dormant behind his numbed brain. He slept with no thought at all and as always, he did not dream.

By morning he'd forgotten the people entirely, thought nothing of human beings living or dead until he saw one or the other and dealt with them as he did...avoid or dispatch..for the most part, though he'd left brace of small game for one group with children and had trekked back to a farmhouse and brought back blankets for a man with an infant he'd seen sheltering in a cave... and weeks had passed before the boy found him. 

Before the boy saved him.

He'd killed a deer...this time not for the meat...he ate so little now a deer would have been wasted and he stuck to small game....but for the hide, and he'd already skun half a dozen large aminals, intent on warmth. Wherever he was was bitterly cold, colder than he'd ever experienced, and the battle to not freeze to death was ongoing and wearing him down. The cold was exhausting and he hadn't been truly warm in weeks. He'd noticed some of his toes beginning to discolor and had stuffed his boots with fur..it hadn't helped much with no real heat from his feet to reflect or hold in but it was better than nothing. The pain was wearing him down, though and the work to skin this deer had him pretty well done in and frustrated. The skins didnt' last, that was the problem. They rotted. He knew they had to be cured somehow, fixed in stasis, rendered non organic, but he had no idea how to do it and until he did he simply replaced them as necessary...and the colder he got the more difficult it was. 

Intent on cleaning the strings of membrane from the inner side of the hide he'd dragged from the corpse of the deer...to stay with it would have been to stay within reach of whatever might scent it...he dismissed the sounds of something crunching around the snow by the carcass as that of scavengers, and had simply picked up the skin and done a quick fade deeper into the woods.  
He hadn't considered for a second that anyone would find him, that anyone would look.   
He was cold. Exhausted. Verging on sick. Slow. The pain in his toes..and now in his fingers, and there were telltale deep purple spots on those as well....was distracting and he was about to pick up the skin and make for shelter when a voice drifted across the silence and he flew to his feet, bow ready to fire before he'd even fully caught his balance.

The words had made no sense, meaningless sounds that didn't matter to him. What mattered was the boy standing in the snow, face and arms smeared with blood, a hunk of raw meat in each bony hand.

Alive. The dead didn't shiver. 

He'd cut meat from the deer, was standing here chewing on some and holding some out, meaningless sounds spilling from his mouth, shaking with cold. 

Alive and male and in front of him. 

He didn't drop the bow, but he didn't fire, his gut telling him this boy was no threat. He didn't know what he WAS, exactly, but he was no threat...aside from his maleness, an instinctive hackle raising chance of fate. Had he been grown that would have been enough for Daryl to fire without a second thought, but this was a child. 

Alive. Cold. Alone.

There was no doubt he was alone, he'd have heard anyone else out there and the woods were winter quiet. There was nobody else out there, living or dead, not within hearing range, not that he could smell, not that he could sense at all. 

Alive, alone, freezing as he was, and gabbling sounds at him. 

He lowered the bow, some rusty knowledge of language creaking over into activity in his head, and the sounds resolved themselves into words.

"You should eat some of this while it's still warm. It helps."

He had, and he only nodded, waving off the boys offer of more. He couldn't hold much, not anymore, and he'd already had his fill of the hot meat and blood. It was why he was still standing.

"There's a building over there, there's nobody in it. I've been in there all winter. It's got a woodstove and it's warm."

The words ended and he waited, silent, listening, but the boy just stood there, blood dripping from his hands into the snow. It was making him nervous. It would draw...things.

As his eyes flicked from the drops of blood to the surrounding woods, the boy nodded.

"Yeah, you're right, I can't hang around like this much longer. I packed up some of that deer to take back with me...if you want to come inside you can."

He turned away then, turned his back, and something clogged and rusted in Daryls brain began to turn over. 

He'd turned his back. He wasn't afraid...and he wasn't a threat. 

Inside. Shelter. Warmth.

But there could be others..others who were a threat.

He let him go, watched him out of sight and then picked up his skin and moved. 

He made no move to follow but it was in his head now, alien and weird...the thought of shelter. Of warmth.

Thought.

He ignored it, walked on, finally found a spot out of the wind, wrapped himself in the skin, started a fire, tried to sleep, but the searing pain in his hands and feet...and now on his face...wouldn't allow it.

Frostbite.

His skin was literally freezing, and when he touched his face it was hard. 

It was too cold. Even with the fire there was no way he'd survive the night. 

His eyes flicked back the way he'd come. The moon was bright, reflecting off the snow it was almost as light as day...he could track the boy, see what this shelter he had was all about, see if he really was alone...and it was his only chance to survive, he knew it.  
Knew, in fact, that he'd be lucky to make it to wherever the boy was before he froze to death.

Well...

He scavenged the area, found a handful of decent sized stones, threw them in the fire.   
When they were too hot to easily touch he scooped them out, tucking one into each boot, the rest into pockets in the layers of clothing he was wearing, wrapped himself in the deer skin and set out.

It didn't take him half an hour to find the boys tracks, not because he hadn't trekked far but because it looked like the kid had followed him a ways.   
He'd never heard him. He was either that far gone or the kid was that quiet.

Unsettling.

He kept to his trail, the stones growing cold, his body growing numb, and he'd just begun to realize that if this place didn't materialize soon he wasn't going to make it when he passed the deer carcass.

True to his words, the kid had cut some out, but not much...not more than one person could carry or use. Maybe he WAS alone.

Wouldn't matter either way, because it was go inside regardless or die anyway and he knew it.

He'd trekked maybe another mile, maybe two, time and distance had receded to nonentities when he smelled the smoke.

Wood smoke.

Someone had a fire.

Instinct warred in him now....telling him to back off, stay away, avoid..and to go toward the smoke, go to the warmth, go where the fire was and go NOW...conflicting survival cues and if he didn't work it out he was going to freeze to death.

He went toward the smell, eyes on the trail, nose to the wind, feet finally crunching onto frozen gravel as his eyes took in a road.

A road.

He couldn't do this. Couldn't do it.

The first real fear he'd felt since the bunkers surged in him and he felt the world tilt as he weighed his options.

GO and maybe be killed...or have to kill.  
STAY and certainly die.

Sighing, too cold now even to shiver, he started up the road.


	20. Chapter 20

The boy had been watching Daryl for a while. 

He hadn't been to many sections of the huge building he'd taken shelter in, mainly the custodians quarters, where he was holed up now, the space between his hidey hole and the pantry, if you could call such an enormous stockpile of food a mere pantry but that was what the sign on the wall said, and the tower, which let him see the surrounding countryside for several miles, and it was from the tower that he'd first spotted Daryl.

He'd been miles out..and the boy had estimated that, from any of the tower balconies he had a good five mile view on a clear day... a dark spec amid the snow, and the boy had thought at first he was just one of the dead, mindlessly shambling nowhere, but as he'd come closer the boy had seen an economy of purpose in his movements, a deliberateness to his direction and had begun to consider that this one was alive.

Alive and possibly able to take his place from him.

Granted it hadn't been particularly hard won. It was clear of both the living and the dead as far as he was able to tell, and he'd been able to get in with one quick wrench of a crowbar, but it was his and he'd made it considerably more difficult to access in the time he'd been here.

Difficult, but not impossible, and if someone was determined enough that someone just might manage, and he had no illusions as to what might happen to him. 

He'd kept his eye on the ever closer spec, watching for him to turn as everyone else seemed to...to follow the path of least resistance which, conveniently, led away from him...the terrain at the base of the hill an almost impassible tangle of bramble, briar, deadfall and thick woods, it didn't invite attempts to penetrate it, and the going was much easier in almost every other direction. Thank God. 

He hadn't done it, drawing steadily closer as days passed, and to top it off, there had been other people down there in the valley. None seemed inclined in his direction, and he'd been satisfied that they were moving through....but they were closer than he liked. Close enough that he could make out their activities if he got out the binocs, and he kept a close watch on them.

He'd seen the solitary man approach them and been relieved. Good. He'd join them and leave with them and get the hell out of his valley.

He hadn't, though. He'd approached, waited, slipped away. The boy thought...he wasn't sure, they were still too far away for any kind of decent detail...he'd left them something. 

Interesting.

He'd kept watching, both relieved and disappointed one morning when he'd scanned the horizon and seen no sign of the man. He certainly hadn't travelled the necessary miles to get out of view overnight. Something must have gotten him. 

He'd been mildly disappointed, slightly amused, and more than a little horrified when it dawned on him that he was treating the lives of the people who wandered into the valley like his own personal television show, but there was nothing much he could do about it. What else was there to do? And after all, it wasn't JUST entertainment, he really did need to see what these people were doing....be ready if it looked like they were coming to his door, and sooner or later, he knew, someone would. After all...he had.

He'd kept watch, spotted the man with the baby a day or so later, the day the temperature dropped into a zone incompatible with life. The thermometer outside the kitchen door read fifteen below zero but that was as low as it went. He was sure it was colder. No way would that baby survive, and they were just outside the grounds too. It occurred to him to wonder, as he bundled and armed to go out, about the peculiar blind spots there seemed to be....this wouldn't be the first of the living to suddenly materialize right at his doorstep so to speak.

Still...a man with an infant wasn't likely to kill him, at least not as long as he was offering shelter for the child. Once in it...well...things could change and he'd have to be careful...but he couldn't leave them out there. 

He'd approached them, cautious and slow and as non threatening as he could manage, but the man had freaked out....babbling nonsense and yelling, waving a gun around, and it became clear almost instantly that he wasn't understanding a word. Shelter, warmth, food....he wasn't hearing it, too far gone, too frozen, too crazy, too AFRAID and the boy had finally given up and left him rather than get himself shot.

They wouldn't last...it was too cold. 

He'd returned to his tower, interest peaked when he'd seen that solitary man back in the picture. Where in hell had he come from? He was poking around one of the farmhouses that edged onto his grounds. Maybe he'd gone inside. But what was he doing?

He got the binocs again, brought him into focus...easy now that he was right there...and saw him hauling a load of blankets.

He'd brought them near to the man and the baby and then stopped. Just...stopped....and the boy was incensed, damn near to going out there, ripping them from him and bringing them to the man and the child, shouting at him from inside the tower to just GIVE THEM TO THE GUY ALREADY! Did he want them to FREEZE???  
But the man didn't move, just waited, and when it got dark and he fell out of view the boy went to bed, puzzled and angry. What was he doing? Why bring blankets he wasn't going to give them? Was he doing something else with them? Was he with a group? Was he making some kind of trap? What was he doing?  
He didn't know....but he was back in the tower first thing in the morning, bincos trained on the spot he'd last seen him. He was gone...and so were the blankets. 

He shifted to the little cave where the man with the baby had been and they were there...shrouded in blankets. So he HAD brought them. But why had he waited? Not that it mattered, it was way too cold for blankets to do much more than buy a little time, if that, but he wasn't going out there to try again to bring that guy in.   
It'd crossed his mind to just take the baby and run but really didn't think he'd stand a chance at getting it away from him. The guy might be crazy but he was pretty sure he wouldn't give the kid up.

Sighing, he'd been about to go back down to his rooms...it was too cold to stay up in the tower for long...when a flash of brilliant color caught his eye.

Red. Brilliant, glaring red. 

He brought it into focus....and there, it was that guy again and he'd killed a deer. Looked like he was skinning it.

Smart.

But a deer hide wouldn't keep him alive out there, not the way the temperature was falling, and even if he went back to the farmhouse, the boy had been there many times...there was no way to create heat. Modernized with central air and heat, it was useless. The janitors space here had it's little woodstove...certainly not toasty when the temperature went plunging into the arctic zone, but enough not to freeze to death. 

Remembering the man with the baby he hesitated. 

This guy was armed and might just shoot him on sight. But then again, he'd tried to help with the blankets. And he was pretty sure he'd seen him leave something for that group out to the east, and they'd moved on....he hadn't hurt them certainly.

And..he was leaving that deer. Just leaving it. He'd taken the skin, but why not the meat??? 

At the very least he wanted some of that meat, it'd been months since he'd had anything that didn't come from a can and MRE's didn't count. They were great, now, when it was cold, because they got hot and hot food was vital, but they weren't FRESH.

Just the thought of fresh meat and blood had saliva squirting into his mouth. He'd learned long ago that, as gross as it seemed at first, you didn't let the blood go to waste. You drank it. It was a supernutrient powerhouse and you could get a lot of it down, a lot more than you could actually EAT. Vampires had had the right idea all along.

So thinking he'd bundled up and gone out, and he'd seen he'd been right...the man wasn't going to kill him. He didn't come, but he wasn't going to kill him. And he hadn't stopped him from taking the meat....meat he was doing his best to cook on the woodstove now.

It wasn't that it wouldn't keep...with the entire building at minus 25 or so he knew it would keep...but he was hesitant to keep anything raw lying around. Who knew what would smell it? And again, when it was this cold, hot food could keep you alive.

Shame the guy who'd killed the deer was going to freeze to death out there tonight.

He flipped the hunk of deer, slid it off the stove and bundled back up again.

One more trip to the tower while there was still a little light, and then it was time to hunker down. 

He was on his way back, no sign of life from any quadrant that he'd been able to see, crossing the hall in front of the main door when he heard the sound.

Faint....almost not there, but his ears now were sharp and he could hear from a long distance away...especially since the world was so quiet now, without the constant hum of power, motors, engines, people.....and yes...he was hearing something.

Crunching.

Uneven....unsteady...not exactly footsteps...but crunching on the gravel road.

Shit.

The tower would be no use, it wasn't situated to see the access road...a blind spot he really really hated....and if someone was coming he'd have to wait here and watch....in the goddamned cold.

And he hated to be here in the hall. It gave off in both directions onto pitch black, cavernous corridors he'd never gone anywhere near, and he hated all that open, empty space. He knew nobody was in there. He'd have heard them...but it creeped him out just the same. 

He cracked the door, wincing at the cold, listened again.

Footsteps. Definitely footsteps. But so uneven...so...shambling.

One of the dead, almost certainly, and he really didn't have to worry about them. They weren't coming in.

But what if it was that guy?

Well, what if it was? Walking like that he'd already frozen to death so...

But maybe not. Maybe he was just cold. Tired. Dying but not dead. Maybe he'd followed him and was on his way to get warm. He HAD told him he could come...it'd be a dick move to just go to bed and bar him out.

But no...those weren't living footsteps. He didn't think.

Fuck.

Fine.

He turned to the stairs, went up to the third floor and into the administrators office..it had a window that gave out onto the road...and sat down to wait and see who would emerge.

The road was a good quarter mile long, and from the sound of it whoever this was still had a ways to go.

Had he been sure it was the man he'd have gone to meet him, but as it was....no.

He'd just wait. And watch. 

The night was clear and bright. He'd see whoever it was the second they cleared the treeline.


	21. Chapter 21

Daryl was pretty well on his last legs. 

Or...leg.

He'd lost all feeling in one foot, it was dead as the proverbial doornail, and he was really just lurching along hoping it wouldn't give out beneath him.

His feet had really never gotten over that swamp rot however long ago it'd been...probably years...and if this didn't just destroy them for good he'd be pretty fucking surprised.

And even more pissed off than he already was.

His mind was going a mile a minute, now, and he had some idea that for the last...years probably...it'd been pretty well shut off. It wasn't that he didn't remember, he did. Every minute. But he couldn't remember really thinking about anything at all and it'd been....peaceful.

Now..fuck. He'd seen that kid, and the kid had spoken to him. Words, real human words, directed at him...words that seemed to be offering to HELP him and what, really???? and that had seemed to need some kind of response and now it seemed he'd brought himself back online and fuck that. 

He had no idea how to shut himself off...suspected if he just kept to himself it would all just go away again...it was driving him insane now, his head actually ACHED with it....or maybe that was the cold, and why was he following this kid again?

The cold, yeah. The cold. Well...he wasn't going to make it anyway and maybe that'd be ok.

Maybe that'd be a relief...and that right there was why he'd shut his mind off, he knew it. To stop all that useless mental whining. Oh I'm so lonely, Oh I'm so sad, Oh I might have killed a whole bunch of people, Oh fuckin shut up already you stupid prick, just shut up.

Yeah. That.

His other foot was going now and who had a mile long driveway anyway? He couldn't track on gravel, had no idea if he was even going the right way, but he had to be because the kids trail had led right here and given the condition of the terrain on the sides of the road there was really nowhere else he could have gone unless he wanted to crawl through thorns big enough to take an eye out.

He wasn't cold, anymore, either, and as nice as it felt...this creeping, sleepy warmth felt really really REALLY good...he knew it was a bad sign. He'd always heard that freezing to death was a wonderful way to go, because you stopped being cold at the end and got nice and warm and sleepy. How anyone knew that he wasn't sure, since the dead didn't come back talking, but however, he knew it was bad.

He had to keep moving, had to, feet or no feet, dying or not, he wasn't about to quit, fuck that.  
And look...the light seemed to be changing up front, didn't it.

Of course that could be "THE LIGHT" right there, he could have slipped off and be on his way out and moving into the legendary light, but he didn't think so.

It looked a lot more like the treeline was ending, opening up...wherever this road led it was right there.

Well....hopefully the kid hadn't been full of shit, and there was somewhere up ahead to get warm. He'd know in a minute, he supposed.

Maybe not a minute. It took a little longer than that to stagger and stumble his way to the end of the road, and when he reached it the sight that met his eyes froze him in his tracks...and for just a moment the fact that he was on his way to freezing to death didn't matter a bit.

The moon was bright, shining on the snow, and the black hulk of the building that sat in front of him...still quite a ways away, honestly, across what once must have been one hell of a lawn...took his breath away.

It was huge...monstrous...and it was, to the best of his ability to understand, a castle. It seemed miles long, a huge, zigzagging sprawl of brick, festooned with balconies and towers and spires....a million windows, arched and round and bowed and if this thing wasn't some goth freaks wet dream he didn't know what was. 

If he died right now..and he wasn't so far gone that he didn't realize that if he didn't shut his mouth and move he just might...it might have been worth it just to see this place.

It couldn't possibly be real.

He was already dead, it was the only explanation. And there was no sign...NO sign...of that kid.

Was there?

He pulled himself in to focus and scanned the building as he began to walk again, looking for any sign of life....and there it was.

Right there, a basement window, small and barred, flickering faint light. And there was the smoke, venting from an improbable duct right in the side of the building.

Someone had put in a woodstove as an afterthought.

That was where the kid was, it had to be.

Or whoever...at this point it didn't matter. He'd go through whoever he had to to get warm.

He staggered toward the door, eyeing the windows as he went for a potential way in. 

Most of them were barred..but there was a weird gap in the doorjamb.

Crowbarred open, more than once. Enough times and any door would pop with one solid pull. He could get in, for sure he could get in, if he...

And then the door disappeared, the weird little gap suddenly a gaping maw and FUCK that door was huge....and he saw the kid, tiny tiny tiny in that huge mouth of a door, shotgun aimed and he had no doubt ready to fire.

Well whatever, he wasn't stopping now, that flickering light was warmth and an army couldn't have stopped him.

And the kid was yelling something at him...yelling....who gave a fuck what.

He kept moving forward, both feet dead numb now, as well as both hands and his face, and he couldn't have spoken if he'd tried and then he saw it...flash..heard the explosion as the gun went off, felt the ground shake near his feet and both hands came up on their own, shielding his face and what the kid was yelling suddenly registered.

"Are you alive?!?!"

He couldn't answer, couldn't make his face move, and froze in place....maybe for the final time because he was not at all sure he could get going again...stood there with his hands over his face, trying to think.

"ARE! YOU! ALIVE!"

He heard the gun draw, knew he was about to get his ass blown to kingdom come, and defaulted to criminal. 

He put his hands up. 

It was a smart move in that the kid immediately put the gun down, a stupid move in that it tipped him off balance and he heard the kid swearing as he went down, no longer really caring because it was a LOT warmer down here.

"Jesus fucking christ..."

He could hear the kid cursing and stumbling through the snow, and he felt a laugh bubbling up inside him.

He'd put his fucking hands up like the kid was a cop. 

It was insanely funny, why he had no idea, and as the warmth crept through his body he couldn't stop laughing. 

"Dude, I'm glad you think this is so funny but you gotta get up."  
There were hands on him now, pulling him, and he could feel tears freezing his eyes open...was he crying? Laughing...he didn't know, but that blind survival drive hadn't quite died and he grabbed onto the kid and pulled himself up, felt his eyes suddenly stabbed and seared and realized they were freezing....

Could you still be alive if your eyes were freezing?

He dragged a hand he couldnt feel toward what he hoped were his eyes and thumped himself good, bringing new tears that let him close his eyelids. Couldn't see but it didn't matter cuz the kid was dragging him along anyway...and it looked like he might be gonna make it after all..if he didn't die from hypothermia even after he got inside, anyway.

Hopefully the kid knew enough to shoot him in the fucking head if he dropped dead on him, supposed he must since he was still alive after all this time..and now they were in, and it was not one bit warmer inside, but the kid was still pulling on him and he was still staggering along on feet he couldn't feel, downstairs, down a hall, and into a room...and the warmth hit him in the eyeballs, the only thing he could still feel, and it hurt...jesus fuck how it hurt...and he heard the little hiss he made, saw the kid turn, felt his legs give out finally, once and for all, and started to laugh again on the way down.

Why?

He had no idea. Life was just fucking ridiculous and he'd put his hands up like the kid was a goddamn cop.

"Hey. Hey!"

He couldn't answer, couldn't move his face.

"Listen, you gotta take off some clothes, so the heat can get to you."

He knew that, but he couldn't move his hands. 

"If I help are you gonna fuck me up?"

That was a joke, right there. He was frozen in place.

He shook his head, held out his hands....not for help but just to show him, and heard the kids little moan of dismay.

"Man....you're gonna be real lucky if you don't lose some fingers."

He was gonna be real lucky if he survived, and he sat there, still as death, while the kid stripped off layer after layer....still not feeling the real heat, still feeling the dreamy warmth spreading from inside his frozen body.

When he was down to just a tshirt the kid stopped, slipped a hand underneath it to touch his skin.

"Man..there's cold coming OUT of you!"

He stopped messing with him long enough to throw a good sized handful of wood on in the stove, and the blaze of heat touched Daryls face...and it didn't feel good at all. No...not one bit.

"Yeah, it's gonna hurt. Can you get your boots off?"

He shook his head again, his fingers just weren't moving and the kid went to work on the frozen laces, murmuring a little in approval at the fur once he got the boots off.

"Very smart. You heat these rocks before you put 'em in there?"

He couldn't answer, but the kid didn't seem to need him to. 

"Probly why you're still alive. They're stone cold now but they bought you some time. You shoulda just come with me. I guess I know why you didn't, because well....people are pretty much assholes now, but really how dangerous do I look? No offense, but you looked a lot more threatening before. You're a whole lot smaller than you looked."

Yeah, well, that was true. He'd pared down to nothing but wiry muscle and bone and he'd never been a big guy to begin with. Stripped of fifteen or so layers he was sure he looked a lot less formidable.

He wanted to tell the kid not to underestimate him....he could still take him out...but his goddamn face hadn't thawed, and even if it had...he felt the laughter start again at the thought of telling this kid he could kill him in a heartbeat...just as soon as he regained some use of his hands.

"Y'know, the best way to warm you up is to take everything off and zip us both into a sleeping bag. I don't necessarily want to do that, and you probly don't either so just come on and get as close to the stove as you can."

Truthfully he wouldn't have cared at all, but the stove was fucking hot as hell and if that wasn't better than some naked kid....and he'd begun to feel the first faint shiver start deep inside and thought maybe...just maybe...he might be gonna live after all.

His skin was thawing for sure, and it hurt like a bitch...he felt a lot like he was sitting IN the fire rather than just near it, and again the insane desire to go back outside flooded through him and he heard the helpless groan that spilled out of him...yeah, it was gonna be bad.

"I know. It's gonna really hurt and I don't know anything to do to help it. "

He was piling blankets around him...not over him, not yet..the kid was smart....but he was making the area as warm and soft as he could, bless him, and now he was sitting close, right up in him, both hands on his face.  
"You're really frozen. You think you can swallow something warm?"  
He had no answer, he had no idea, and the shivers were starting to really get going now, really get going, radiating from deep inside him.

Fuck.

"Can you sip this if I hold the cup?"

He could try, he was goddamn thirsty as well as frozen, and the first few sips seemed to work out...didn't hurt, and the heat going down was blessed...blessed.

He didn't know what he was sipping, didn't care, it tasted of iron and salt, familiar but unidentifiable at the moment...hot and liquid and something kind of like heaven.

For the few minutes before it suddenly came rushing back up, no warning, no sickness, no idea it was going to happen, one minute he was swalling it gratefully, the next it all came back up with one unexpected gag, surprising and startling them both.  
What the fuck.

"Man...you're still too cold, I'm sorry, I'm sorry....we can try again in a few minutes..don't freak out, it's deer blood, not yours."

He hadn't even noticed it was blood.

But god he was shaking so hard now, and it hurt....goddamn how it hurt.

He begain to think he might survive, but it was going to be one goddamn long fucking night.


	22. Chapter 22

The temperature outside continued to plummet. Had weather reporting still existed they'd have been disconcerted to know that the mean temperature..still not at it's bottom...had reached negative 23 by midnight with a windchill dropping it to minus 45, and that it was actually a few degrees warmer at the arctic circle than it was in their little corner of the planet.

Unaware of this, the only thing they had to go by was the steadily falling temperature inside their little room, and no amount of freely thrown in wood seemed able to keep up with it. 

The boy, having given not only his blankets but an arctic rated sleeping bag over to Daryl, sat against an interior wall, shivering, wondering how long he'd last before he went over there and insisted the man either use the blankets he'd given him or give them all back. At this rate they were both going to freeze.

For Daryl, already colder than he was reasonably sure he could survive, the increasing cold was negligable and he sat as he'd been...as close to the stove as possible, knees drawn up, head resting atop them, as wrapped in himself as he could be. The boys blankets sat unused...his skin hurt too much to tolerate the touch of the fabric and he was more or less counting on the combination of violent shivering and proximity to the stove to produce enough heat to keep him alive. 

Had he had any idea that the cold he felt was real, and that the boy was gradually becoming hypothermic, he'd have already wrapped the boy up in them but the kid wasn't speaking...neither was he...and he had no idea.  
He periodically tried to sip at one of the random cups of hot liquid the boy had scattered on the top of the stove, but the shakes were making it hard, and more than once the boy had come over and wrapped his hand around Daryls, holding it steady so he could drink, and it was this that finally opened the door to some kind of communication and possibly saved both their lives.

They'd realize later just how ridiculously close they'd come to silently freezing to death together and laugh, but that would be later...much later.

For now, silence reigned, Daryl withdrawn even from himself in an extremity of exhaustion, pain, and a blazing self distrust that had amped his anxiety into the stratosphere. He didn't know what had happened to the last people he'd been with, the last people who had taken him in, he was terrified he'd hurt them, that he might hurt this boy...and the returning memories were fast threatening to take him apart. 

Sitting there, feeling his insides shake, he wished for nothing more than the numb blankness he'd lived with for the better part of the last year, and he'd have happily given up the rest of his life to just make the memories stop. 

His eyes, frozen and burning beyond belief, filled repeatedly with helpless tears of memory, the pain driving him to wish he could just gouge them out...and gouge out his brain while he was at it...

None of this evident to the boy, who saw only a man curled in on himself, silent and unmoving but for the shakes, his face a horror show when he occasionally looked up....waxy white and greasy with sweat, lips blue and bloodless, eyes a scarlet nightmare, he looked like a corpse and the boy had no doubt he didn't feel much better...but he wouldn't wrap up in the blankets, couldn't really drink more than a sip at a time, wouldn't let him near enough to warm him with his own heat....he'd accept the boys hand around his for a moment but as soon as he'd swallowed what he could he'd push him away...gently but with absolutely no doubt that he wasn't going to tolerate any kind of proximity.

But it was cold....and getting colder.

The boy could see the ice that had formed inside the window glass had started to spread down the wall, and a glance upward showed him a thick rhime of frost on the ceiling and the tops of the walls. 

The building around them was freezing and their tiny stove....

Sighing, he looked around more carefully, saw the frost buildup along the corners of the floor, heard the clitter of a cup on the stove and crawled over to Daryl, wrapping his hand once again in his own to help him drink...startled when those scarlet and blue eyes fastened on his, concern blazing from them, and the other hand came up and gripped them both, 

"You're hand's as cold as mine, what's up with that?!"

The boy, who thought it was self evident, merely shrugged.

"Yeah well..it's cold. The building's freezing, look...there's frost everywhere. You think it can get so cold that fire can actually freeze?"

"I....no."

Daryl, pulled out of himself for the moment, glanced around, wincing at the pain in his eyes but able to see that the boy was right....there was a heavy rim of frost taking over their shelter.

"Jeeeeesus christ, how cold do you think it is out there? Listen...do you have anything that can cover that window?"

"Yeah, there's some poly in the other room but it's not gonna help. The whole buidling is freezing and this little fire...."

"Isn't enough, I get that. I saw this place coming in, it's huge. But....look we gotta insulate this room the best we can. What is there? We can't seal it up in plastic, the air'll get too bad...."

"You're saying "we" but you can't do anything, look at your hands and feet."

"I can do what I have to, what is there...is there anything?"

The boy nodded, pointing toward a door across the room.

"That's the janitors supply room I guess...there's a bunch of wood, some rolls of that pink fluff with the foil backing...that's..."

"That's insulation, can you get that?"

"Sure."

He crossed to the door, shrugging as he went, unaware of the brutal shock about to come down on them both. He'd known that that their fire wasn't keeping up, but he hadn't understood just how much it was really making a difference until he opened the door to the storeroom and the full force of negative 45 degrees hit him in the face, instantly sealing his nostrils shut, searing his eyes.

"FUCK!!! Man..."

He slammed the door, headed back to the fire and began reaching for clothing.

"If you're gonna help me, you better put something on, it's the same temperature in there that it is outside. Did my eyes frost up??! Did my EYES frost up?!"

They hadn't, and Daryl reached for his face, held him still.

"Calm down. Your eyes are ok. We can do this. Do you know where the stuff we want is?"

"Yeah, yeah...it's across the room, straight ahead, maybe ten feet. There's ten or twelve rolls of the stuff. I got no idea how long we can last in there..."

Daryl, already pulling his clothes back on, ignoring the pain for the moment, gathered up the stones the kid had taken from his pockets and threw them in the fire.

"Not long, probably. If it's cold enough to freeze the walls it's way way way below zero. Jesus christ we're in here undressed, we're fucking lucky we're not frozen solid."

He stopped moving, stopped talking, a look of utter misery crossing his features.

"Fuck. There was a guy out there with a baby...."

"Yeah, I know. I saw you gave them some blankets. They didn't make it."

"You saw? How..."

"The tower. I'll show you later. But they're already gone. I saw them stop moving a couple days ago. They're dead. Dead and I think frozen because they haven't moved. That's how I knew...they stopped moving. Even if they'd made it then...nobody out there tonight is gonna survive. Hell, we might not even survive."

"We'll survive. Why didn't you bring them in, too?"

"I tried, he wouldn't come. I thought about just trying to take the baby but..."

"Yeah, he wouldn't have let you. You got something to fish those rocks out with?"

"Tongs hanging on the wall by...I'll do it. Look, you shouldn't go in there."

He pulled the stones out, held one in the tongs and dropped it into a pocket.

"Hold your coat out...."

He dropped one into Daryls, watching him shiver as he pulled another layer on over the top.

"Look, you're still really too cold to go in there..."

"Shut up, two is faster. Where, exactly, is this stuff."

"Right dead ahead against the far wall. I'll bring a lantern. It's all sitting on and under a big table. Jesus, I opened the door for a second and it dropped it in here by like...fifty degrees. You CANT go in there."

"Neither can you but it looks like we're both doing it. Look, people go to like...the north pole and shit all the time and they live. They hang out outside, sleep in tents and stuff. We can manage two minutes in a room. We have to or we're done for anyway so may as well die trying, right?"

"No, listen. I'll get the insulation. Just inside the door, to the right, there's a hammer and a big box of nails sitting on the workbench. You grab those and get back by the fire."

"And leave you to carry all kinds of...no way, kid, we're..."

"Tim. My name's Tim. If we're gonna die together you should at least know my name."

"Tim. We're not gonna die. We're gonna freeze our balls off but we're not gonna die."

"You gonna tell me your name?"

"Just as soon as I remember it. Come on, lets do this."

They did it with a minimum of pain, though they did learn that it could be too cold for a fire...the lantern went out within seconds of being set down, not that it mattered because Tim was right about where the rolls of fiberglass were and between them it didn't take three minutes to get them out of the storeroom and into their little room....rapidly dropping to below freezing now, and by the time Tim had snagged the hammer and nails and slammed the door shut he was shivering so violently he'd caught his tongue between his teeth multiple times and blood was running freely down his frozen face....he found he didn't care, it felt good...it was warm.

Daryl had stopped shivering again and his thoughts had migrated far into the back of his skull....only the knowledge that they'd both die if he didn't keep it together keeping him conscious. 

"You mighta been right, kid..."

His words were slurred and thick, and the pain in his hands had disappeared....not a good sign, he knew.

"I know I was right. Go sit on the goddamn stove for a minute. I don't know how this shit works, can you tell me?"

"Yeah. Gimme those rocks..."

"They're still hot. Just tell me what to do. Swallow some of that hot water and tell me what to do and don't get up."

"Fuck that. Come on, I got this."

Stubborn got him through, and the knowledge that he needed to both keep moving and to help get as much of that shit up as soon as possible, and though the room had developed a decided pitch and yaw he ignored it....ignored the burning in his hands and face, the noteable lack of shivering, and the feeling that his insides were all running down into his feet...and together they managed to reasonably cover the exterior walls, including the window with a narrow slit for ventilation along the sill, and the section of floor they were sleeping on before Daryl's strength gave out.  
"Kid.."

"Tim."

"Tim. I gotta stop, it feels like my heart can't beat anymore."

Alarmed, Tim was on him in a second, fingers on the pulse in his throat.

"You're heart's beating fine, it's kinda fast though. Go sit on the fucking stove. Tell me what to do and I'll finish."

"You ok?"

"Yeah, I'm just cold. Drink some of that fake broth...is it even still hot?"

"No, kinda lukewarm."

"Fuck. Drink it anyway. Should I do the ceiling?"

"Can you reach it?"

"Not all of it, I should of grabbed the ladder from in there....I don't really want to open that door again."

"Cover what you can get to and then get over here and get into these blankets."

"Can you throw some more wood in the stove?"

"Yeah I can. Look, how many lanterns you got?"

"I dont know, five or six."

He had climbed to the top of the table and started nailing the insulation to the ceiling when Daryl heard the sound and froze, holding up a hand.

"Stop, Tim, stop! Listen."

It came to them, loud on the silence....a heavy, deep cracking....the sound of miles of glass splitting down the middle, ice out on a frozen river, the world itself cracking in two like a china plate.  
The boy looked up, around, horror on his face.

"My god, what is it?! Is it the building?! Is it falling in?!"

Daryl, bloody eyes still sharp as tacks, instinct still on high alert, shushed him with a hand, ears tuned to the sounds.

"I dont think so. At least not the part we're in. It sounds further away. Don't hammer anymore, though."

"No! No....listen, most of this building is condemned!"

"I know, I saw it when I walked up. Not this part though, this part looks solid."

"Yeah it is. This was the administration section. They put a rubber roof on it and it didn't rot when they closed the place like all the rest of it did. You ever seen the wizard of oz?"

"I...yeah..."

"If you go down the halls off the main lobby there are little doors at the end. Open them and it's like stepping into oz. You go from empty and dusty but otherwise fine to huge cave ins, missing floors, no roof, walls falling down....just open a door and it's destroyed on the other side. You think that's what that sound is?"

"Maybe. Probably. I think a lot of it is the trees."

"It's so cold it's CRACKING THE TREES?!"

"I don't know. I think so. I hope so. Listen, take the rest of that and just wind it around the base of the walls as much as you can. Don't nail it just kind of wrap it around and then get over here and get inside these blankets with me."

"Why'd you want to know about the lanterns?"

"OH..."

He'd forgotten...and honestly everything was starting to slip now.

"Um...light them all and put them around the room. As much heat as we can get the better."

"Ok. Ok....did you drink that broth?"

"Yeah. What I didn't spill, anyway."

"Ok."

He finished with the fiberglass, set out the lanterns, setting them on low to keep the fuel longer and careful not to get them close to anything they could ignite, and...barely walking now, exhausted and frozen, crawled back to the pile of insulation they'd situated their blankets on.

"You doin' ok?"

"I don't know. I think I'm warmer but I was nice and warm outside, too."

"I don't think it's that. I think it's warmer in here. Look at the water on the stove."

Daryl looked, unable at first to focus, finally realizing that there was a little steam hovering over the surface of the liquid. The water was getting hot.

"Wait...wait a minute."

The boy moved away from the nest they'd made, back to the worktable, dug around in a drawer for a minute, coming out, finally, with an old tin sign and flashing it with a grin.  
"Thermometer, look! We can see just how close to freezing to death we actually are."  
He brought it over, set it just outside their circle of blankets, away from the fire.  
"We'll see in a few minutes. Do you have those stones?"  
"I threw them back in the fire. Figured we could put them in the blankets."  
"Fuck those blankets, I have an arctic sleeping bag that's rated for something like fifty below. We're gonna both get in that with a few hot rocks and I think we're gonna be ok. Do you know you're name yet? If I'm gonna sleep with you I feel like I should know your name."

"Daryl."

"Daryl. Ok. Well...I wouldn't strip down too much, it's too fucking cold, but we shouldn't be all layered up if we want each others heat. Shoe's off, too."

"Already off. My fuckin toes were killing me."

"They ok?"

"I don't know. I think so. You drink anything?"

"Yeah, I'm good."

He zipped the bag around Daryl, took a last look around at the lanterns and the fire, noting the mercury in the old thermometer sign.

"Look....we're up to a nice toasty 27 degrees in here. Not only are we above zero but we're in the double digits. We might survive this night."

"Probably won't get much warmer even with all this fire."

"I know, but we'll be ok in the bag. I've slept in it when it's been below freezing before and been ok. And we got hot rocks and extra body heat."

"No offense but you're kinda whistling in the wind, dude."

"I know. I'm scared as fuck. Aren't you?"

"I think so but I'm too tired to notice."

He winced as the boy slid in, contact making his burning skin feel abraded, sighing as the boys heat almost instantly washed over him.

"Geeeez you're warm."

"You're not. Daryl...I had no idea you were still so cold...."

"I'm ok..."

"Like hell."  
He slid in close, not hard to do since the bag, though a double, wasn't precisely roomy, and pulled Daryl in.  
"You should know I don't usually get this handsy on a first date, but..."

"Fuck off. I don't care, you're warm. Fuck..."

He'd started to shiver again, realizing only now that he hadn't been. 

"Hell of a thing. I warm you up, you freeze me out with all this cold coming outta you. If you die in the middle of the night and bite me..."

"Not funny."

"I know."

It wasn't, and they went quiet, both of them listening to the sounds of the night cracking around them, drowsing to each others heartbeats as warmth finally began to fill the space inside the bag.

They came awake, once...startled and gasping together at a crack so loud and so sharp it sounded as if the world really had cracked in two....sitting up and waiting for destruction to rain down on them...relaxing, finally, when nothing happened, both sets of eyes roaming the room...checking.

"Daryl, look. We've made it all the way up to 39."

"Mmmhm."

He started to lie down but the kid stopped him, one hand on his arm.

"Wait a second, here."

He passed him a cup, the liquid in it steaming in earnest, now.

"Drink this. Don't throw it up on me this time."

He took the cup, tasted iron and salt, glanced up at the boy and saw him with his own cup.

"We'll need it to keep on making heat. If it makes you too thirsty there's still plenty of water, but..."  
He nodded, drank it down, put the cup back and reached for the water, rinsing away the thick coating in his mouth. He agreed with the kid...the stuff was a nutrient powerhouse and had kept him alive many times...and god knew he needed it now... but he was never really going to like it. 

"Kid, you still got the meat you took?"

"Yeah, in there."

He pointed toward another room.

"Big block of deer ice by now. Why, you hungry?"

"No, I just...I don't even know why I asked. It's cold as fuck."

"It is."

They slid back into the warmth of the sleeping bag together, Daryl already drifting toward sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, smiling a little as he felt the boy snuggle into his arms...not just for warmth this time, this was comfort and he recognized it and slid an arm around him, heard his breathing start to even out.

Good.

Just a kid and all alone but he'd managed to not only stay alive but to set himself up pretty well..and to haul Daryls ass out of the fire as well.

Pretty damned impressive.

Thinking that this Tim kid was not a bad guy to have around, he drifted into sleep himself and neither of them woke again until daylight, when the fire, finally, burned out.


	23. Chapter 23

The cold didn't break with daylight, and while it got no colder, the continual snap and crack of breakage was unsettling at best. Trapped in their tiny shelter, strangers forced into extremes of intimacy, it worked their collective nerves.  
That first morning after the fire had gone out, Daryl got up to relight it, limping badly and fumbling the lighter, driving Tim to take a good hard look at his toes and fingers...no easy task in the limited light and not helped much by Daryls impatience. He'd been worried he'd see the black of dead tissue, and there were a few tiny spots...tiny so far...but for the most part they were just a fiery, angry red....inflamed and insulted and painful but likely to heal as long as they weren't refrozen any time soon. 

He forced him back onto the blankets, ignoring every protest and not caring one bit that Daryl outweighed and outmuscled him.  
"You can't walk around like that, get it? You can't. Not that I think there's any reason to go out, but even if there is it's gonna be me. You're gonna have to stay here, keep your hands and feet warm."  
Daryl, not the least bit happy at the thought, chafed almost immediately, though it was hard to argue when the kid slipped back under the covers with him, flooding him with drowsy warmth that made it difficult to think about ever getting up again, let alone outside in the cold. Still, it wasn't in his nature to take kindly to being held back.

"How long does this shit take to heal up?"

"Not that long, couple days..."  
Tim settled himself back under the blankets, fighting the urge to get comfortable. He was going to have to get up and go to the storeroom to get them food...not a long walk but a damn cold one.

" I mean normally you wouldn't need to stay off them you'd just need to not REFREEZE them, but you've got some black spots and that can get real ugly real fast. Little tiny spots like that usually just dry up and fall off but....you can lose 'em. And it's so cold now that if you get out of bed you're gonna freeze 'em. How come you don't know this?"  
"Kid, I'm from Georgia. It don't even think about this kinda cold there."

"Georgia! That's the accent then. How'd you get way up here?"

He leaned up on one arm to look at his companion, interested now in how this guy came to be here, noting on inspection the lines around his eyes, etching his face. He was older than he'd at first thought and by a considerable jump.

"Wherever way up here is, I walked. Could you not stare at me like that? Where the fuck am I, anyway?"

"Sorry, but you're interesting to look at."

Daryls snort didn't put him off any.

"And come on...no way did you walk from Georgia!"

"I did walk from Georgia."

"How?"

"The fuck you mean, 'how'. How you think?"

"But like...well when did you leave?"

"Shit kid...I don't fuckin know. When did the world go to hell?"

There was no answer and he sensed the boy waiting, sighed, continued, slipping one hand behind his head, the other up under his shirt, where it was warmer, wincing a little at the sting and the occasional shiver...those, it seemed, just weren't about to stop no matter how warm he thought he was.

"I guess I lost Merle that first summer, right when it all started. He was my brother..."

"Younger than you?"

"Older."

"How old are you?"

"Fuck if I know. When the shit hit the fan I was 43. How old're you?"

"Well, when the shit hit the fan I was 13. What happened to your brother?"

"Got bit. Put him down. Started walkin. Don't know why I figured to go north, it just seemed like it would be smarter. Go north and stay away from people. Walked all that summer, got sick from a tick bite in the fall. Turned into something in my lungs, almost died. Some people took me in, spent most of the winter with them. Started walking again right before spring. Near as I can tell there's been another whole summer and a whole lotta winter so I guess I been walking for what...a couple years?"

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"Well...I mean, didn't you want to find someplace safe and just stay?"

"Kid...I don't know what I wanted. Tell you the truth I don't remember a whole lot about anything that happened after I left the fort. Autopilot I guess. And safe? Safe don't exist, not anymore. Not in this world."

"You were in a fort?"

"Yeah. Good setup, really. Pretty safe, lots of supplies."

"Why'd you leave?"

"I just left. What about you? You been on your own all this time?"

"Mostly. Started off with my family but to tell you the truth they were kind of stupid about it. Didn't want to believe it was really happening, y'know? My mom was all in huge denial. The dead don't walk, blah blah blah. Sure looked to me like they were walking...and biting....but she was just all about staying inside and waiting for "someone" to fix it. I don't know who she thought..."

"Merle kind of had that idea too. Wanted to go to the CDC."

"Yeah, my dad wanted to do that. I kept saying to 'em, when the dead start walking around it's because "they" COULDN'T fix it, but....y'know. People get scared and they don't want to see what's right in front of them."

"Saw a lot of that."

He didn't ask what had happened. In the end it didn't matter...the kid was on his own. 

"How long you been alone?"

"Since that first summer. I headed for the mountains. Figured there wouldn't be many people there, plenty of water, game....joined up with a couple groups but I never stayed. There were always assholes, always stupid people, always that guy that was gonna get you killed, know what I mean?"

"Sure do."

"Little kids...."

They both fell silent for a while, and Daryl found himself marveling at the kids strength...and sense. He was something, no doubt.

"How'd you find this place?"

"I knew it was here. My brother and his friends used to come up here and party in the condemned part. He brought me up here with him a couple times so I could check it out, y'know? He stopped when he got worried I might fall through a floor. When I realized where I was I started looking for it. Seemed like it was worth checking out. I knew the pantry was stuffed with MRE's...military rations..."

"I know what they are."

"Oh. Yeah. I'm gonna get up and go get some in a couple minutes...I hope they'll still heat up. They gotta be massively frozen now. You think they will?"

"Won't know till we try."

"I guess....anyway, this place...I figured there wouldn't be people in it because it was falling down and dangerous..but I knew if the admin section was clear it was in good shape, and I already knew about the janitors apartment. We found this note in here one day....the machine shop is down the hall and we were messing around in there, playing with all the equipment and there was a note talking about what a mess the custodians apartment was. It said "It was never like this when Ed was here" and it got to be a joke. We would text each other..."it was never like this when ed..."

His voice broke, suddenly...and his sharp inhale told Daryl how unexpected the flood of memory had been, how startling the hurt, and he watched as the boy hid his face, slipping back under the covers.

Sighing, he pulled his hand out from the warmth inside his shirt, slipped his arm around the kid and pulled him in, nodding as he felt the kids arms go around him, holding a little tighter as he felt the warm wetness of tears on his chest.

He let it be, didn't speak...after all there were no words that could do any good. The world had ended and even two years out it had a way of hitting like a sudden kick to the head. God knew he'd done it to himself a few more times than he liked to admit...at least until his own mind got sick of it and shut off. 

He shifted a little, made them both more comfortable and felt his eyes falling closed, warmth and exhaustion taking him under little by little...felt the little twitches in the boys body as his tears tapered off and sleep took him as well. 

Again they slept, and when they woke..suddenly, rudely... it was to a crack unmistakably in the room with them and a stream of bright, clean, arctic cold washing over their faces.

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of living for feedback this time around. I'm finding Daryl challenging. Any and all comments, good bad or indifferent, gratefully accepted.


End file.
